THE CASE OF THE WEST HIGHLAND CROFTER. the soil and
the nature of the climate are much better suited for the growth of cereal crops. The tale of grievance and dis- content which the Commission will be asked to hear is likely, therefore, to be briefer and less emphatic than the doleful and monotonous narratives which have hitherto been recited.
The recital will do good. It comes all too late, however, to set forth in full the wrongs and cruelties of which a patient, patriotic, and warm-hearted people have been the victims. Much nonsense has undoubtedly been written and spoken about the rude abundance and full content that prevailed among them, before the social revolution which has thrown them into their present wretched plight. Such descriptions take their glory from afar. They are the natural exaggera- tions of a dreamy, imaginative, romantic race, much addicted to retrospect, and not deficient in self-esteem. Neither the pretty fallacies of pastoral poets, nor the vaunts of those who cherish a sentimental admiration of the past, will blind the sober-minded inquirer to the fact that under the patriarchal system, with all its traditional checks, the life of the masses was in later times meanly prosaic, as it always had been miserably servile. The change that ensued, however, after the collapse of the Jacobite cause, turned greatly to their disadvantage. The old relations between the laird and people were broken. The nobles and gentry lost interest in their homes and in their kinsfolk. Many of them were allured by the fascinations of fashionable life to extravagance and ruin, in the manner and with the consequences graphically described by Adam Smith. They were forced first to mortgage, and then to dispose of, the estates which had been made over to them absolutely, in defiance of the consuetudinary rule which regarded the children of the soil as its proprietors, and forbade the chief to diminish the general property by alienation or sale. The new comers were aliens. They brought with them strictly commercial notions. They looked for the prompt payment of as high a rent as they could get, with the least amount of trouble. Sheep-farming upon a large scale was introduced. It were mere fractious folly to deny that the maintenance of sheep was the best use that the mountains could be put to, almost the only remunerative use that can be got out of them. Equally absurd would it be to shut one's eyes to the immense advance that has been made in the general aspect and pro- ductiveness of the country. A Highlander who went to Canada forty years ago would in many cases scarcely recognise his native glen. The old hill-track, strewn with boulders bigger than those over which the Roman chariots rumbled on their itinera, can hardly be traced now; and instead, there is a level road, constructed in a style that beats Macadam. The battered change-house, redolent of smoke, filth, and whisky, the scene of many an uproarious brawl, has been super- seded by a trim hotel, where one can get good food decently cooked and decently served. Swamps have been drained ; the extent of land that grew only heather has been curtailed ; and, though the mania for sport has inter- fered with the development of pastoral farming, wherever the flockmaster is unmolested the tokens of knowledge, skill, energy, and enterprise are discernible. The change would have been gratifying, save for one unhappy circumstance. It was carried out in a manner too sweeping and sudden. It involved the displacement of the native population from the most fertile parts of the territory their ancestors had occupied for ages. They were cleared off wholesale ; their townships were broken up ; they were driven away to.remote and barren nooks, were huddled together in miserable hamlets upon the sea-coast, were impelled to the lowlands and the great towns, or else were shipped off to foreign lands. It is not too much to say that, if the multitudinous, simul- taneous, and systematic clearings which took place in the West Highlands, with no adequate provision—in some cases, with no provision at all—for the future of those dispossessed, had occurred in Ireland, they would have raised an unappeasable clamour and stimulated recourse on a large scale to "the wild justice of revenge." In the Highlands they did evoke a bitter cry of grief, despair, and wrath ; but they were borne with surprising meekness and patience, and no instance of murderous or even violent retaliation can be cited. The Highlands are exempt from the stain of agrarian outrage and bloodshed.
It must strike every attentive reader of the evidence adduced before the Commission that the situation and complaints of the Hebridean crofter are almost identical with those so often heard from the West Irish peasant. He has too little land, not enough to support a family. It is too highly rented, the sates being out of all proportion to what is paid by large farmers. He is a tenant-at-will, liable to be turned adrift at any moment. He lives perpetually on the brink of famine, for when fishing and crops are both abundant, he is separated from it only by a slight remove, while the failure of either thrusts him into the abyss. The proprietors in many instances are absentees, and absenteeism tends to beget indifference as respects sufferings the extent and detail of which may be kept concealed. The analogy goes much farther. It affects not only the condition of the people, but their character and habits. With great capabilities, many serviceable qualities, many most admirable gifts, the home-staying Celt is indolent, apt to prefer the enjoyment of life to its amelioration, and to seek that enjoy- ment not in wrestling with adverse circumstance, but in surrender to a very dreary and unenviable dolee far niente. The Celt of the West Highlands is less turbulent than the Celt of West Ireland, but he is every whit as impracticable. Both can toil, venture, endure, save,—when they have a mind. But this is done by fits and starts, for a time and for a purpose ; there is no love of work for the sake of work ; the internal spring liberates itself by jerks and runs. Both cling with a fond tenacity, unsurpassed by any other people, to the place of their birth ; they would rather starve and shiver on the insufficient strips of land by which they variegate the rugged slopes, whence the rain often washes away the best soil as soon as it is turned up, than face the hazards of the unknown ; they cannot be uprooted, but there follows a plaintive moan, like that of the fabled mandrake. Yet both, in favour- ing circumstances, make splendid colonists, and in all our large towns both give examples of distinguished success. Perhaps the Scot has most of adaptability and ambition, for the Irish need to be rather sparsely intermixed with people of other races, so that they may take the tone of society, instead of giving it, their tendency being, wherever they congre- gate in any number, to form a little Ireland. Once trend- planted, however, the Highlander is almost certain to make his way, whether singly or amid a crowd of his country- men. The number who attain position and wealth in Scotland is certainly equal in proportion to that furnished by their Lowland neighbours. The experience of Glasgow amply illustrates these statements. That city has a very large Irish population ; it has been estimated at one-fourth of the whole inhabitants. A lamentable fact is that this section contributes a full half of the pauperism which weighs upon the city. The Scoto-Celtic element is almost as strong as the Teutonic. The " Macs " are of themselves a formidable nation. They fill many pages of the Directory, and besides them there are scores of names as unmistakeably Gaelic as Ben Nevis or Ben MacDhui. Among their owners are many of the best, most intelligent, most prosperous, public-spirited, and benevolent men in the city. Ethnic amalgamation must have had some influence upon the development of the high qualities they exhibit ; but there are instances of fresh immigrants keeping even pace with settlers of long descent, and it is an interesting problem why the inherent characteristics they display should not find scope and reward at home. Is it over-sanguine to hope for the appearance of an in- dustrious, self-reliant, thriving peasantry in the districts which have been the scene of the recent investigation? Well- informed and sober-minded people think not. Evidently, things cannot remain as they are. There exists a reaction against the large-farm system as an exclusive system. In those districts where it has been carried out with most thoroughness, it has been disastrously overdone. There are seasons when the flockmaster needs additional labour, and it cannot now be had. Moreover, the distress which has lately fallen upon the tillers of the soil has also lighted heavily upon sheep-breeders ; and many excellent farms are tenantless,—the proprietors being, of course, tempted to turn them into deer forests, which continue to bring a fancy rental. Men of foresight, however, are sceptical as to the permanence of the taste for deer-stalking at such an enormous cost as it entails, and they dread, with reason, the imposition of a heavy tax upon a mode of pleasure-seeing which condemns a vast expanse of land to unproductiveness. The Duke of Suther- land, it is understood, means to reverse the policy pursued by his predecessors, to break up some of his colossal farms into moderately-sized holdings, at the same time to provide ample accommodation for a fair proportion of the peasant class, and so to restore that healthy equipoise which belongs to a graded and well-regulated society. His example is pretty sure to be followed, and where it is so in like circumstances, there will come, if not any large increase of popula- tion, yet a very sensible improvement in their comforts, their resources, their prospects, and the temper in which they face the battle of life. On the other side, it is un- deniable that there are districts which, under the best con- ditions, would be over-peopled by the present population, which are so over-peopled under existing conditions that it is inevit- able the inhabitants must be subjected to constant privations, whence there can be no escape unless their numbers are reduced. Ere the reforms contemplated by the Duke of Sutherland could be imitated in these regions, it is indis- pensable that a large emigration should take place, and it would be necessary afterwards that a subdivision of holdings and the growth afresh of a redundant population should be prohibited. Given these terms, along with that universal education which is now enforced, and there seems no reason why the Croft system should not be so amended as to be rendered work- able, despite the poverty of the soil and the frequent wet- ness of the seasons. Then might one hope to see the depressed and care-worn look of the inhabitants replaced by something of the alert blitheness that springs from conscious independence ; the dismal hovels that dot remote and barren hill-sides cleared away, along with the miserable kraals that form straggling lanes along the unpropitious and storm- beaten coast ; the small, green patches of land, with their varied growths of oats and barley, potatoes and weeds, superseded .by a more efficient style of husbandry ; and a state of things which is a discredit to our country and a stain upon our civilisation wholly reformed.
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