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PREFACE
SOME thirty years ago or more, when spending my summer holidays among
the breezy Bens of dear old Scotland at Braemar, with the full cup of
joy which on these occasions was poured into my soul, one drop of
bitterness was mingled—the tear of sorrow for the misfortunes and
maltreatment of our brave Highland people written visibly on the face of
that beautiful country. Wherever I turned my foot in my lonely
wanderings up the straths and through the glens, I came on the ruins of
cottages where once happy families dwelt, whose sons and daughters,
brought up in an atmosphere of moral and physical health exceptionally
good, had through long generations contributed in a remarkable degree to
the glory of the British name abroad, and the comfort of domestic life
at home; now, as by the passing wing of destroying angel, they had all
been swept away, leaving nothing behind but dreariness and desolation?
Being a rhymer by temperament, and finding a certain relief to my sorrow
in lyrical utterance, I gave voice to my feelings at the time in certain
‘Braemar Ballads’ and other poems, appended to the first edition of my ‘
Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece,’ published in 1857. Those effusions,
as was natural, attracted some notice from the Press, and from private
friends in the granite metropolis of Aberdeen, in which city I then held
the office of Professor of Humanity. One of these gentlemen, seeing how
earnestly I was occupied, not only with poetical sentiment, but with the
plain prose of the matter, gave me the hint, that, if instead of weeping
fruitless tears and flinging woeful ballads into the idle ears of
passing tourists, or the deaf ears of local landlords and land-agents, I
were to send a sober statement of facts to the ‘Times’ newspaper, he had
influence to get a leader from the thundering Jupiter of the Press in
favour of the poor people whose unworthy treatment had so moved my pity,
which would have more influence on the public mind than a century of
sonnets from the best poet in the country. I accordingly did so; the
leader appeared ; and did not appear without a sequence. For six weeks
after the appearance of that number of the paper, I found my
breakfast-table loaded with newspapers from all parts of the world,
containing accounts of the process by which the glens of my beloved
Highlands had been denuded of their natural population, and the very
pith and marrow of the rural life in the Highlands sacrificed to
economic theories alike unhuman and impolitic, and to aristocratic
pleasure-hunting which sowed the seeds of disaffection and stirred up
class against class throughout the land. This outbreak of the flow of
popular indignation at the appearance of a passing word from a daily
newspaper, could not have taken place without a serious cause; I was
forced to conclude that there was something radically unsound in the
economy of the Highlands; and the analogy of the usurpation of the lands
of the Italian yeomanry by the aristocracy in the latter days of the
Roman Republic, with the consequent patriotic struggle of the Gracchi to
restore the land to the people, flashed with a painful vividness on my
mind. From that time forward, the case of my poor fellow-countrymen in
the glens lay upon my soul, a burden of which I could not acquit myself;
and the yearly rambles which I continued to make into remote parts of
the Highlands assumed more and more the character of a grave social duty
going hand in hand with a healthy summer recreation. Some years after my
summer in Braemar, I took a tour into Sutherland, and stayed six weeks
at Durness. This tour brought me face to face with a yet more dreary
desolation than I had witnessed in Braemar; I was now made acquainted
with the heartrending details of those violent evictions in the far
North which roused the indignation of that noble-minded Scot, Hugh
Miller, and called forth a protest from one of the greatest economists
and historians of the continent. I walked down the whole length of
Strathnaver, from its desolate southern end to its northern declivity,
where the extruded peasantry some seventy years ago had been huddled
down to the coast; and I composed on the spot the ballad of ‘ Bonnie
Strathnaver/ published in the ‘Scotsman’newspaper, which I was happy to
be informed from various quarters had been largely circulated in
Sutherlandshire, and had been the means of dropping some kindly balm of
human sympathy into the bleeding wounds of the mis-used peasantry. The
investigation thus commenced into the rural economics of the Highlands,
was continued year after year, till there remained scarcely a district
which I had not visited, and where I had not ascertained, with the
witness of my own eyes, both the lamentable effects of general
mismanagement, and the good results of exceptional wise administration.
Further, in pursuing these inquiries, it soon became manifest to me,
that the special evils under which the Highlanders groaned were no
isolated phenomenon, but were merely the natural result of a general
one-sided and unjust body of Land Laws ; of which the operation in the
remote Highlands, as in Ireland, had been intensified by local
peculiarities. I was accordingly forced to widen the sphere of my
studies, and to inquire systematically into the rural economics and
agrarian legislation in various countries of Europe, for the purpose of
contrast and comparison. Once put upon this scent, I found by reading,
and by observation made on the spot, ample materials for important
inductions in Rome, in Florence, in Germany, and in the Channel Islands
; I then read all the books and pamphlets I could procure on rural
economy, and on the Land Laws, both from the legal and the economical
point of view ; and I crowned my studies with a careful perusal of the
Report of the late Royal Commission on the condition of the crofters and
cottars in the Highlands and Islands.
I have made this statement, because I think the readers of this book are
entitled to know what opportunities I have had of making myself
acquainted with a subject that did not seem to lie in the line of my
professional studies. I ought to have mentioned also, in the same view,
that having pitched my summer quarters for twelve years in the centre of
the Western Highlands, and having taken the trouble to make myself
acquainted with the language and poetry of the people, I consider that I
have enjoyed advantages in penetrating to the core of this matter which
have been the lot of few; and in order that my testimony as an
independent witness might stand before the reader valeat
quantum valeat, I
took care not to read a single page of the evidence laid before the
Commission till the whole of my text, up to p. 206, had been written;
and I have not found occasion from anything in that Report to alter a
single word in the results of my own independent studies.
In conclusion I have to return my special thanks to his Grace the Duke
of Sutherland, and his Commissioner, Sir Arnold Kemball, for the kind
manner in which they opened their views to me on this subject; to Sir
Kenneth MacKenzie of Gairloch, Bart.; to Lachlan MacDonald, Esq., of
Skeabost, Skye; to Roderick Maclean, Esq., Manager of Estate to Sir
Alex. Matheson of Ardross ; to Mr. Ross, Teaninich, Alness ; to John
Mackay, C.E., Hereford; to the Dean of Guild, Inverness, specially for
the use of several valuable and rare pamphlets on the history of
Highland economy; and last, not least, to Fraser Macintosh, Esq., M.P.,
who gave me very valuable information, from his own experience, and from
the stores of his private library.1
Edinburgh,
1st November, 1884.
1 Those interested in
the detailed history of the Clearances, will find an interesting account
of the depopulation that went on in Badenoch, first in 1770, and
recently in 1876, in the ‘Celtic Magazine,’ vol. ii., September 1877, by
Mr. Macintosh, a paper which came to my knowledge by favour of the
author unfortunately too late to take its place in the text.
The Scottish Highlanders and
the Land Laws
An Historico-Economical enquiry by John Stuart Blackie, F.R.S.E.,
Emeritus Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh (1885) (pdf) |
