3 A.L. Irel., ii. 127, 137.

4 A.L. Irel., i. 159. The word finé is translated tribe. The group family is more likely to have been the 5 See Y.B. 16 Edw. III., vol. i. xxxi and 108.

unit.

CHAPTER XXXVI

ECONOMIC CAUSES IN WESTERN SCOTLAND

THE history of Western Scotland, as the society suited to its pastoral needs met the political and economic change, is even more sad, I think, than that of Ireland. Ireland, a rich country, from her very possibilities of wealth obnoxious to the stronger neighbour, has suffered longer and has suffered far more, and continues to suffer. But at least her suffering, her destruction, has come from outside, from an alien and a hostile nation, who from her geographical position possess both her body and soul.

Western Scotland, a purely pastoral region, off the road of commerce, where agriculture was a very subsidiary occupation, with no great harbours like Ireland opening to the West and calling her to the new world, with scant population and poor communications, has been exploited and sold by its leaders, its tribal chiefs.

The problem here was a very difficult one, which had been felt long before the revolution caused by the '45 made it a political question. The population always threatened to outgrow the means of life; the possibilities of alleviation by increase of commerce or by emigration were in those days very small indeed; and the men of the West had in consequence become a constant thorn in the side of their Lowland neighbours by their plundering raids and demands of blackmail, conditions which it was impossible should be allowed by the federal power to continue.1 The only means adopted of meeting the difficulty had been, as in Ireland, military suppres

sion, accompanied by such incidents as the brutal massacre of Glencoe at the orders of William III.

Let us try to look at the subject from all points of view. It is not, as in Ireland, a contest between a government beyond seas forcing plantation, grievously breaking faith, calling in the aid of ghastly massacres, of famine, of exportation for slavery, of all the horrors of the worst ages of warfare, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covering it all, as the running sore of Ulster does to this day, with a pretence of religious fervour and an accusation of impending attack of the wolf by the lamb. It was in Western Scotland a conflict of social systems created and continued by permanent natural economic causes, and affected by transient influences arising out of politics and European war and the discoveries of science.

There are certain outstanding facts which cannot be gainsaid or ignored. A great part of the country is rough, rocky, hilly, and barren, giving only a bare subsistence to cattle or sheep, and suited only to those breeds which are hardy and active foragers and not choice feeders. It is easily overstocked. The climate in the Central Highlands is very severe. In the valleys along the streams where the soil is good and productive the rainfall is a perpetual discouragement to arable cultivation. Marshall, in his General View of the Agriculture of the Central Highlands of Scotland (i.e. Perthshire, the part lying nearest to the arable districts), in 1794 (p. 16), describes it as "a small proportion of arable crops; a greater proportion of green pasturage and meadow; a vast extent of heath, intermixed with herbage and scattered with rocks and stones; with some extensive tracts of natural and planted woods."

Under these conditions of soil and climate the communal form of society had continued to suit the country and had remained. The hill pastures were enjoyed in common by all the occupiers of the small township holdings which I mentioned above (supra, pp. 289-92). All, says Marshall, as late as 1794, was unenclosed, except sometimes "march dykes," stone walls between the lands of neighbouring proprietors; but he says the separations were not intended as fences against sheep,

which still overran the country during the six months of winter, when the entire district might be said to lie in the most perfect state of common.

It was upon this common use of the hill pastures that the Highland farmer depended for his existence, and it is by the seizure of these that his destruction is effected. Like the small farming class of the other parts of the islands, he is crushed by exclusion from the waste (supra, pp. 267, 279, 293-5).

The Danger of Overpopulation. -The continuation of the system depended on some means being found by which the surplus population, as it became too great for support from the soil, could be disposed of, pointing to emigration as the remedy. But, on the other hand, an equally indisputable fact, of which, owing to the views then taken of political economy, and to the interests of the chiefs and Lowland sheep farmers which accorded with it, little notice was taken, was this that if those who had power succeeded, as happened, in destroying and driving away the men who by historical tradition and inheritance of social ideals were attached to the land, it would be extremely improbable that any other class of men would be willing permanently to occupy so poor a soil with so bleak a climate in so remote a region. Agricultural writers, even though advocates of large farms, saw this danger. Marshall, in the work already quoted, strongly urged keeping the people there, saying that they were attached to their native country, and that, if once depopulated, the Highlands would not be easily repeopled, as strangers would not have the same attachment.

Still another important fact was that the chiefs had become very largely absentees, only visiting the country for a very short period of the year or at intervals of several years. They inclined to become, instead of chiefs, rent chargers.

After the '45 the clan system was politically broken up, but without anything being put in its place except obedience to the political economy of the day. The chief ceased to have any legal or political authority as chief of the clan, but he acquired the position of absolute proprietor of the lands of the clan, entitled to all the profits to be got out of the land as owner. His was the only title acknowledged.

Under the old system he had been comparatively poor, in contrast to the Lowland Scot or English proprietors of arable lands and to the captains of industry of the South; but he was proud of poverty resulting from fidelity to his position as head of a community which forbade him to increase, without their consent, the contributions of the freemen paid to him in respect of their membership of the clan. These customary dues as yet remained the basis on which the holdings of the tribesmen were apportioned, or, as it had come to be called and considered, rent for the land.

The chief and the clansman alike had despised the Lowland merchant sacrificing all to personal profits, as much as the Lowlander despised him and his black cattle. But when his patriarchal authority was destroyed, when he ceased to be the head of the group family, but was politically and socially put on a level with his followers, the chief gradually made up for the change by adapting himself to the commercial spirit of the age. Owing to the tie between the chief and the clansmen, who had in the recent war fought and suffered together, very little change took place until the generation had died out. But if the process was slow, it was sure. The new men acted on commercial principles, and, says the Earl of Selkirk,2 "as an unavoidable consequence, the Highlands in general must soon fall into that state of occupancy and cultivation which is most conducive to the pecuniary interest of its individual proprietors."

The Chief becomes Absolute Owner.-There you come at once in contact with the idea which was being steadily impressed from without on the converted chief, his assignee and his factor, that he should view the land as an individual proprietor entitled to all the profit to be got out of it. The land had ceased to belong to the sept; it was no longer a tie between him and his people; it was his as absolute owner. He had no one to consider but himself, and he was urged to approach this most difficult problem solely from the standpoint of the absolute individual owner who had to do the best he could with his own property.

The crux of the entire question, from the point of view of the practical economist who did not desire revolutionary

methods, was the regulation of the hill pastures, so that they should not be overstocked by the animals of the Highland Club farmers. This was in the first instance the business of the chief. In each of the officiaries, each consisting of an ancient barony, says Marshall, speaking of the divisions of the great Highland estates, resides a ground officer, generally a principal tenant. He is a bailiff and more, seeing to repairs of roads, settling of disputes, etc. He calls in to settle disputes, birleymen, sworn appraisers and valuers. It was the chief's duty to see that this was done. I refer to pp. 351–354. If there was overstocking, the chief was responsible for it.

But the chief had become an absentee in Edinburgh or London, enjoying a milder climate and the pleasures of town society or English country life. There was no longer the reciprocity of rights and duties which made the then existing conditions of user of the land a possible foundation for society. He had become a rent charger, having rights without any corresponding obligations; the only test of the prosperity of the country was to be the amount of the rent which the absentee owner could squeeze out of the holders of the land; and every circumstance of the century helped to harden him in the belief that he was not only legally but politically and socially just and right, and that the savage evictions of the Highland tenantry for a century and a half were an "improvement."

Unfortunately, in the handling of a question of such supreme difficulty, the soulless political economy of the age governed everything from first to last. It was the age of the individual money maker, of Adam Smith. Society was nothing; manhood was nothing; if there was a surplus population, they must seek the market for their labour, and find a home elsewhere. Everything was to be sacrificed to the benefit of the individual owner.

When landed estates belonging to individuals are on a large scale, they do not want surplus population. Like the big shop managed on commercial principles, the desire is to attain the greatest possible profit at the smallest cost. Where a society owns land, the profits must be subordinated to the employment to be found for the members, and to their social welfare.