his feet. From this position they were to be driven out to make way for strangers who would pay to the absentee chief a higher rent, driven out to be treated as cottagers dependent on casual daily labour at the will of those who had transplanted them, or of those to whom they had leased or sold the land.

The temptation to the chiefs was very great indeed. The difference between the tribal dues from the club farms and the rents offered by the Lowland sheep farmer was enormous. The highest croft, says the Report of the Commission on the Highlands speaking of Sutherland, pays £7, 168. The lowest farm stands for £290. A classic case, I believe, is that of the summer grazing in Glengarry, for which the Kintail Highlanders paid £15, but for which a Lowland sheep farmer offered £350. The increased rent did not mean any increased value in the land or any higher farming, which with such a locality and such a climate was not likely. But it meant, what the apologists for the evictions called an "improvement," a much larger rent into the pocket of the lord.

This did not alter the view taken by the freeman. The £15 to him represented the dues paid to his chief as an honour (as Tacitus says) and not as a competition rent. And so, even though without hope, he fought for his rights.

Writing of the men of Ross, who in 1792 had risen and driven off the sheep which had been brought to stock their farms turned into a sheep walk, the Earl of Selkirk goes on to say there is scarcely any part of the Highlands that has not in its time been in a state of irritation as great as that of Ross-shire in 1792. What was the remedy?

We come upon another unquestionable fact; the communal contributions were, according to the political economy of the day, out of date. The contributions to the chief had remained stationary; the farmers on the spot had all the advantage of ownership on payment of small dues, and they could take advantage of the rising prices owed to European war and increased commerce. Why not? The chiefs had become permanent absentees called by larger interests to the South, only exercising the privileges of chiefs when as

officers of the British army they led the Highlanders into battle against a foreign enemy, often highly esteemed in England on this account. Their expenses in the southern country had outrun the receipts from their Highland proprietors.

So far as the society was concerned, no harm was done by the farmers being freed from heavy rents in a country where capital meant cattle or sheep. But the theory that the value of land was its rental value called for a clean sweep of the old system, and the Roman idea of the absolute dominium of the lord had extinguished wholly the tradition of common ownership and common interests.

It became a general habit of most of the Highland chiefs or proprietors from the last quarter of the eighteenth throughout the nineteenth century to evict the Highland freemen from their hill pasture and arable holdings, and to turn the land into large sheep farms for their personal benefit. Where they were not able to do so it was the result of the strenuous, violent resistance of the occupants.

The facts collected in Mackenzie's Highland Clearances about these evictions in all parts of the Highlands, together with other contemporary accounts, the Reports of the Commissions and the trials of alleged rioters, form a most lamentable picture on which I have neither time nor inclination to dwell. The evictions appear from cumulative evidence to have been carried out with an extreme of cruelty. The proprietors in whose names the evictions were made were in large measure absentees who acted through factors; the new tenants, to give them legal authority, were sometimes made Justices of the Peace; and in many cases the clergy, who had hitherto held their pasturage in common with the freemen, got their advantage by supporting the landlords (see supra, p. 49). They could have checked the clearances, but they benefited by them, getting enclosure of their hill pasturage, increased arable land, and buildings.

To hasten the removals, Macleod says, the factors burnt the heath pasture so that the cattle should have no feed, at the same time by the burning destroying the fences of the arable lands so that the crops could not be protected.

Speaking of the evictions in Sutherland in the very severe winter of 1816, he says, "I have seen scores of these men employed for weeks together, with the snow from two to four feet deep, watching their corn from being devoured by the hungry sheep of the incoming tenants; carrying on their backs-horses being unavailable in such a case, across a country without roads-on an average of twenty miles, to their new allotments on the sea-coast, any portion of their grain and potatoes they could secure under such dreadful circumstances." Donald Macleod says, "I was an eyewitness of the scene. Strong parties for each district, furnished with faggots and other combustibles, rushed on the dwellings of this devoted people and immediately commenced setting fire to them, proceeding in their work with the greatest rapidity until about three hundred houses were in flames." He describes the scene, the people striving to remove the sick and helpless before the fire should reach them, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire; "I myself counted 250 blazing houses, many of the owners of which were my relations and all of whom I personally knew."

As a result, "ancient respectable tenants," says General Stewart,4 "who passed the greater part of life in the enjoyment of abundance and in the exercise of hospitality and charity, possessing stocks of ten, twenty, thirty breeding cows with the usual proportion of other stock, are now pining on one or two acres of bad land with one or two starvéd cows.

But Sutherland was only one part of the vast area over which this revolution was effected. The evictions, the burnings, the forced emigrations, the transplantation of the poor have gone on over the whole of the Highlands for a century and a half. Probably the worst accounts of any are those of the treatment of Glengarry, Knoydart, the property of the Bairds in 1853. Leckmelm, in the parish of Lochbroom, was bought by Mr Pirie, a paper manufacturer of Aberdeen, in 1879. He took the land into his own hands, seizing the hill pasture and simply allowing the tenants to

remain in the cottages where they might have no living animal, not even a hen, but must live in the condition of serfs, doing such work as he might choose to give them.

His notice to the tenants to this effect ordered them, if they wished to remain in the cottages, "to prevent your sheep and other stock from grazing or trespassing upon the enclosures and hill and other lands now in the occupation or possession of the said Mr Pirie."

As one more contemporary account in a lecture given in Aberdeen on these evictions of Mr Pirie in December 1880, the Rev. John Macmillan, Free Church Minister of the parish,5 said, “The first move was to dispossess the people of their sheep. As long as tenants have a hold of the hill pastures by sheep, and especially if it be what we term a commonage or club farm, it is impossible to lay it waste in part."

The process was the same as it had been in England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and in Ulster in the seventeenth.

The first step was to drive them off the waste or forest. In the trial of the Bernara rioters (Blackwood, 1874), the crofters were ordered to remove from "fens, grass and houses, with their respective shares of moor grazing thereto attached, and from their respective shares in the summer grazings or sheiling ground on the farm of Earshadder." The common grazing rights, says the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Highlands, 1883, form the real obstacle to "improvement.'

The Rev. John Macmillan went on to say: "During the first ten years of the great war Skye had given 4000 of its sons to the army. It had been comforted that 1600 Skyemen had stood in the ranks at Waterloo. To-day in Skye, far as the eye can reach, nothing but a bare brown waste is to be seen, where still the mounds and ruined gables rise over the melancholy landscapes." In 1882 the people in Skye were by notice forbidden to walk on the sheep grazing farms and were forbidden to keep dogs.

Game and Deer Forests.-One of the bitterest elements in these evictions from their homes must have been the refusal by the lord, whether the descendant of an old chief

or a new paper manufacturer, to allow the freemen to make use of any of the game or fish with which the woods and the lochs abounded. Evicting the men for deer forests to be preserved for the use of the lord began very early. Here Scotland imitated Plantagenet and Tudor England in the eighteenth century. In 1784 the Duke of Atholl cleared Glen Tilt. This was a very fertile valley occupied as usual by a township farm, each family having a piece of arable land, and holding the pasture in common. They had the right to fish and hunt. They were accustomed to take their cattle in the summer season to a higher glen which is watered by the River Tarf. The Duke appointed Glen Tarf for a deer forest, and built a high dyke at the head of Glen Tilt. The deer increased and jumped the dyke. The people complained. The Duke added another thousand acres to the deer forest until gradually he wiped out all the tenants.

Marshall in 1794, mentioning the feeding of mountain deer, observes that "little advantage is derived from this mode of occupying land," and expects it to go out. He did not foresee the wholesale evictions which were to take place on this account.

Writing in 1882 on the Nationalisation of Land, Dr Russel Wallace asserts that more than 2,000,000 acres of Scottish soil were then devoted to the preservation of deer. "On many of these forests there is the finest pasture in Scotland, while the valleys would support a population of small farmers. At the same time the whole people of England (? Scotland) are shut out from many of the grandest and most interesting scenes of their native land, gamekeepers and watchers forbidding the tourist or naturalist to trespass on some of the wildest Scotch mountains."

The Royal Commission on the Highlands, 1883, sums up the matter by reporting that in past times the "sub-tenant ... on the vast unappropriated waste. . . could pasture a greater number of live stock"; now he "has been confined within narrow limits sometimes on inferior and exhausted soil." The waste for the most part is still unappropriated and unimproved except for the keepers and watchers and land and water bailiffs, who prevent the habitants of the soil