A HEBRIDEAN GRAND VIZIER.
ADVOCATES of Tenant-right will do well to study a pamphlet entitled "A Report of the Trial of the so-called Bernera Rioters at Stornoway," published by Blackwood. It gives a vivid picture of Highland life, and it is also a startling exhibition of the extent to which the small tenantry of a remote district may lie in the power of their landlords. The islands of Lewis, Rona, Bernera, and several others, belong to Sir James-Matheson, the Member for Inverness-shire. He is as absolutely their master as Mr. Augustus Smith was the- Lord of the Scilly Isles. Or rather, it is the empty honour of ownership which belongs to Sir James, and the real Sovereign of the Northern Hebrides is his Chamberlain, Mr. Donald Munro. That gentleman is full of honours and dignities. He is a, solicitor in Stornoway, the chief town of Lewis, chairman of four parochial boards, chair- man of four school-boards, vice-chairman of the harbour trustees, director of the Stornoway gas company, deputy-chairman of the road trustees, law-adviser for the four parochial boards, justice of the peace, notary public, and baron-baillie of Lewis. He was also once the commanding officer of the First Company of the Ross- shire Artillery Volunteers. He was likewise procurator-fiscal, or public prosecutor, of the district, until the Sheriff of the county saw fit to dismiss him from an office which he did not think should be held by the master of the people. But his most im- portant place is that of Factor or Chamberlain to the Lord of the Isles, Sir James Matheson. As Sir James must be absent from his kingdom for a considerable part of the year, the Grand Vizier is the real sovereign. He is, indeed, a tremendous potentate, and like the old Bourbons, he knows the value of elaborate etiquette. He allows no small tenant to enter his official room with his head covered or his hands in his pockets. Any small tenant who commits that offence is fined. We are happy to add that a fine is also exacted from any small tenant who comes into the presence- chamber with an unwashed face. Cleanliness is not the supreme virtue of the Highlanders, and if Mr. Munro is to fine them for anything, he cannot do better than put a tax on grimy faces. But we are troubled to hear that he •fines only the poor. As his power is absolute, he ought to fine all round, and send a report of the results to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, if the Revenue should not become brisker will bu,glad, indeed, to lay his hand on any new tax. We are persuaded that a tax on dirty faces would give Sir Stafford Northcote an immense surplus. Let him, then, make Donald Munro Fiscal Inspector of the Great Unwashed.
The Chamberlain has peculiar ideas of equity, as well as of the fiscal uses of unclean faces and bad-breeding, and they came out in his dealings with the tenants in the island of Bernera. Each of these
small farmers has a piece of pasture-land in Lewis itself, besides the ground which they till in Bernera. The "Earshader grazings," as they are called, are used in the summer. The poor people had formerly gratings on the Cuallin Hills, but Sir James Matheson turned the place into a deer-forest, and when deer come sheep must go. The tenants changed their ground reluctantly, but they were assured that so long as they had crofts in Ber- nera they would be allowed to keep the new grazing-ground. They seem to have further understood that they would be allowed to retain those little farms,so long as they paid their rents regularly and behaved themselves. Such is the testimony of the Ground- officer, who was the ambassador between the Grand Vizier and them. But they had not reached the end of their troubles when they fancied that they had secured themselves against eviction. Beside the grazings lay a deer-forest, and they found that they had to pay a fine of 2s. 6d. or 3s. for each of their sheep that strayed into the sacred ground. So it was necessary that a wall should be built between the forest and pasture-land. Since it was the deer that had to be protected, and not the sheep, it might naturally be supposed that the owner of the deer would build the wall. Every foot was, nevertheless, erected by the poor people at their own expense, and it was seven miles long. Surely that is a pathetic admission of their helplessness, and their eagerness to accept any terms that would allow them to live. Yet, after the wall had been built, the Grand Vizier resolved to shift the tenants again, and he determined•to do so in the fullness of his.own power, without consulting his nominal sovereign. So he sent a Sheriff's officer and the Ground-officer to fifty-six of the people with notices to quit. The paper specified that they must leave their arable land as well as the grazings, and in fact, that they should be cast adrift on the world ; but the Chamberlain afterwards stated in a court of justice that the reference to the crofts and houses was only a matter of form, and that he intended to de- prive them merely of the pasture. There is not the slightest reason why we should believe such a story ; but even if it were true, the fact would remain that the tenants were to be deprived of the land which they themselves had walled in ; and it is also clear that they interpreted the summons in its literal sense. They were assured, it is true, that they would receive other land ; but the rent was to be increased, and the people believed that they must reduce their stock. No wonder that they were indignant.
-The notices were delivered by a sheriff's officer, who seems to have been as great an official in his own way as the Chamberlain himself, and the Ground-officer who went with him appears to have stirred up the anger of the people by-the insulting way in which he intimated the pleasure of his chief. Some of the crofters, or perhaps of their young sons and daughters—for this part of the narrative is not clear—resented the treatment by flinging a few clods at the messengers ; and the Sheriff's officer, in his turn, became so angry as to loudly express a wish that he had brought a rifle or a revolver with him. Had he done so, he declared that he would have made some of the women lament the leas of their sons. That threat he repeated again and again. Coming to the ears of the people, it naturally alarmed them, and next morning, when the ambassadors were about to leave the island, some of the young men came to the Sheriff's officer and asked whether he had really used the menace. They intended to seek redress at law, if he should state that he had employed suoh a threat. But the officer of the law was too wary to commit himself, and he tried to get away from the questioning throng. Then the young men attempted to detain him until he should answer, and they seized hold of a waterproof coat which hung over his arm. He pulled one way, they pulled in another, and the coat was torn. But there the scuffie.ended, and the Sheriff's officer was allowed to depart unhurt. So little troubled was he, that he played cheerful tunes on the bag-pipes when going home. He had, however, obtained the materials for a serious accusation against the peasantry. Rumours spread that the crofters had resisted the enforcement of the law, and one of the rebels was seized the first time that he came to Stornoway. He and two others were tried before the Sheriff; but the evidence against them was so contemptible that the attempt to convict them was ignominiously defeated, and the prisoners were set free. The Sheriff's officer in his turn was charged with assaulting one of the men after he had been arrested, and he was convicted. So far the Grand Vizier was defeated. But the poor tenantry still lie under sentence of expulsion. They appealed to Sir James Matheson himself, but they got no reply.
The story is slight, and in a sense trivial ; but it is valuable for the light which it throws on the power wielded by the owners of the soil in the Highlands of Scotland. No despotism could be more complete. And some of them rule an almost,
kingly stretch of territory. Some of them can ride over their ••■ estates for thirty or forty miles in one direction without seeing a patch of ground that is not their own. Most of it is moor- land, no doubt, and is of little value in comparison with the rich corn-fields of England. It is chiefly made up of bare hill. sides and deserted glens. But there was a time when those glens were not deserted. Some that are now absolutely bare once held nearly a hundred families, and many were once the sites of thirty or forty farms. The walls of many old homesteads are still standing, and the furrows of the fields can still be marked amid the rank grass and the over-growing heather. There is not a sadder sight in all the Highlands. The men and the women who once lived in those cottages belonged to a class which is unhappily becoming rare, and the loss of which we shall some day bitterly regret. It will be said that they lived in poverty, and that it was better for them to seek comfort in the United States than to toil for a bare subsistence in Lewis or Braemar. But many of them never went to America ; they went to the slums of the large towns,—and such places of horror as the Cowgate of Edinburgh, with its rich collection of the most villanous faces under the sun, is a terrible commentary on the Highland clearances. That it was necessary, in some cases, to lessen the number of the inhabitants is unquestionable, and equally undeniable is it that the work was sometimes done with humanity,—the poor crofters being sent to America at the expense of the landlord, and there provided with means of subsistence. But in many other cases they were simply shovelled out as if they had been so much rubbish, and left to beg or die, for all that their master cared. The Sutherlandahire clearances raised a cry of indignation throughout Europe, but they were not so bad as many others. In Sutherlandshire the purpose of the landlord was respectable, for it was to mass the small farms into sheep-runs, and whatever the motive may have been, the change did add to the national supply of food. But most of the later clearances have been effected for the pur- pose of supplying rich and brainless men with what they call " sport " in the shape of deer-stalking. Deer can be stalked only in a desert. They must be free from the intrusion of farmers, shepherds, sheep, and even grouse. And in order that a few rich and titled men may fill up the vacancy of the autumn and of their own minds by shooting a few timid stags, thousands of families have been turned adrift on the world, and whole glens have •been converted into solitudes. The artificers of all this ruin and misery have not even the excuse that they want to make money. Most of them are rich beyond the dreams of plebeian avarice, and they have really sacrificed a part of their rent-roll in order to secure a desert for the gratification of their own selfish pleasure. Standing in the midst of one of those artificial solitudes, a few weeks ago, a distinguished Indian statesman, the ruler of millions, said to the present writer that nothing could so incline him to be a Democrat as the sight of such colossal aristocratic selfishness. The country says little about the scandal, because it is ignorant of the facts, or does not know what they mean. But the truth cannot be long hidden, and meanwhile the great landowners of the Highlands are fashioning the moat dangerous weapons ever put into the hands of demagogues. If they were not blind to the future, they would not dare to push poor homesteads and family life out of the way to make a hunting-field. The walls of ruined homes will some day testify against them with words more terribly eloquent than any democratic denuncia- tions. Every attempt to repeat the social crime of riding rough- shod over the sacred, if unwritten, rights of the poor people who lie at their mercy should meanwhile be singled out for the only punishment that the Highland landlords fear,—the punishment of publicity. They do dread the tribunal of the Newspapers. They have been known to take away a man's farm from him because he had given some accurate, and therefore damaging, information respecting the extent of the land that had been made a desert for the sake of deer. No opportunity should be lost of holding up their acts to the ignominy of public notice, and therefore we have let daylight in upon the not unexceptionally harsh, though hard and absolute sovereignty exercised by Sir James Matheson's Grand Vizier.
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