Highland people

“ Why then should there be any lamentation over the Highlanders leaving their country more than over any other class of respectable willing men? Anything more hopelessly wretched than their position at various times from 1745 down to the present day it would be impossible to imagine. If one, however, trusted the descriptions of some poets and sentimentalists, a happier or more comfortably situated people than the Highlanders at one time were could not be found on the face of the globe. ”

“ Moreover, the Highlanders had to learn an inevitable and a salutary lesson, that in this or in any country under one government, where prosperity and harmony are desired, no particular section of the people is to consider itself as having a right to one particular part of the country. The Highlands for the Highlanders is a barbarous, selfish, obstructive cry in a united and progressive nation. It seems to be the law of nature, as it is the law of progress, that those who can make the best use of any district ought to have it. ”

“ Whatever the material condition of the Highland people, whatever their lack, in many parishes, of elementary education, they possessed, in legends, Märchen, traditional poems, and the living art of popular song, a native culture—rich, dignified, and imaginative—which newspapers merely destroy. ”

“ The Highlands now contain a considerable lowland population, and the Highlanders are scattered over the length and breadth of the land, and indeed of the world, honourably fulfilling the noble part they have to play in the world’s history. Ere long there will be neither Highlander nor Lowlander; we shall all be one people, having the best qualities of the blood of the formerly two antagonistic races running in our veins. It is, we have no doubt, with men as with other animals, the best breeds are got by judicious crossings. ”

“ Some such consequences were to be expected from the breaking up of a system which had held sway for many generations, and the substitution of a state of matters to which the people were altogether unused, and which ran counter to all their prejudices and traditions; still, as in the case of every reformation, individual suffering was to be looked for, and in the course of time, as will be seen, matters gradually righted themselves, and the Highlands became as progressive and prosperous as any other part of the country. ”

“ Every account we have of the Highlands during the earlier part of the 18th century, agrees in the fact that the Highlands were over-peopled and over-stocked, that it was impossible for the land to yield sufficient to support the men and beasts who lived upon it. Hence, this drafting off of a considerable portion of the population gave that which remained breathing-room; fewer people were left to support, and it is to be supposed that the condition of these would be improved. ”

“ Swayed by the example of the godly among them, and away from the influences by which less sequestered localities were corrupted, the body of the people in the Highlands became distinguished as the most peaceable and virtuous peasantry in Britain. ”

“ Agriculture is as good, the Highland sheep and cattle are famous, the people are about as comfortable as lowlanders in the same circumstances; education is well diffused; churches of all sects are plentiful, and ere long, doubtless, so far as outward circumstances are concerned, there will be no difference between the Highlands and Lowlands. How the universal improvement of the Highlands is mainly to be accomplished, we shall state in the words of Sir John M’Neill. ”

“ The kind and generous inhabitants assembled in crowds to witness the departure of their gallant friends, and as the Highlanders marched onward with a steady and collected air, the people breathed many a fervent expression for their safety. ”

“ But I have ever found the people of those border districts of the Highlands which join on to the low country, or that inhabit districts much traversed by tourists, of a comparatively inferior cast: the finer qualities of the Highland character seem easily injured: the hospitality, the simplicity, the unsuspecting honesty, disappear; and we find, instead, a people rapacious, suspicious, and unscrupulous, considerably beneath the Lowland average. ”

“ He looks at nature as a man of culture and tender sympathies, and with an independent eye; and what he sings comes with all the freshness of the evening breeze as it sweeps o’er the Highland loch. One [297] theme he especially dwells on—the depopulation of the Highlands. His heart is saddened as he sees the Lowland shepherd, who has no sympathy with the place, the people, or their language, treading with his dogs the glens and hillsides where many expatriated Gaels had once their happy homes. He has also written several love lyrics which are admirable in conception and expression. ”

“ It is only a gathering together of material that is common to Highland tradition and Highland literature, but if it shows what an amount of such material, even on one side phase of Highland life, really exists, it will have served a good purpose. In every hamlet in the Highlands there is surely some individual patriotic enough to take an interest in its folk-lore, and intelligent enough to see the necessity for saving still more of it, and these people can do more to preserve it, if only by giving it a place in the columns of the weekly papers, than any one collector or writer. ”

“ Their subsequent history there, and the excellent agricultural condition into which they in after years brought their small holdings, is a standing refutation of the charge so often made against the Highland people, that they are lazy and incapable of properly cultivating the land. ”

“ Every writer who pretends to record facts, the result of observation, and not to draw imaginary Arcadian pictures, concurs in describing the country as being sunk in the lowest state of wretchedness. The description we have already given of the condition of the people before 1745, applies with intensified force to the greater part of the Highlands for long after that year. ”

“ Yet notwithstanding their miserable and filthy huts, their scanty and poor food, their tattered and insufficient clothes, their lean cattle and meagre crops, their country wet above and below, their apparent want of all amusements and of anything to lighten their cheerless condition, and the oppressive [28] exactions of their chiefs, the Highlanders as a body certainly do not seem to have been an unhappy or discontented people, or to have had any feeling of the discomfort attending their lot. ”

“ As to the Highlands, the tradition remained for a long time, and we believe does so still in many parts, that under the old regime, chiefs were always kind as fathers, and the people faithful and loving as children; the men were tall and brave, and the women fair and pure; the cattle were fat and plentiful, and the land produced abundance for man and beast ”

“ None will visit the Highlands without having some knowledge of their history; and the changes that have long been taking place in the condition of the people will be affectingly recognised wherever they go, in spite even of what might have appeared the insuperable barriers of nature. ”

“ They were bound, more strongly bound perhaps than the proprietors of any other district, to show some consideration for the people on their estates, and not to act as if proprietors had the sole right to benefit by the land of a country, and that the people had no right whatever. Had they been more gentle, introduced the changes gradually and judiciously, and given the native Highlanders a chance to retrieve themselves, much permanent good might have been done, and much suffering and bitterness spared. ”

“ Fordun, who concludes his Chronicle immediately before the first appearance of a Highland clan beyond the Highland Line, gives the following description of the inhabitants of the Highlands:—‘The Highlanders and people of the Islands are,’ he says, ‘a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress, hostile to the Anglic people and language, and, owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. ”

“ For long previous to 1745, it is asserted the Highlands were much over-peopled, and the people, as a consequence of the vicious system under which they had lived for generations, were incurably lazy, and could be roused from this sad lethargy only by some such radical measures as were adopted. The whole system of Highland life and manners and habits were almost barbarous, the method of farming was thoroughly pernicious and unproductive, the stock of cattle worthless and excessive, and so badly managed that about one half perished every winter. ”

“ And, lastly, they have an adherence to one another as Highlanders in opposition to the people of the low country, whom they despise as inferior to them in courage, and believe they have a right to plunder them whenever it is in their power. This last arises from a tradition that the Lowlands, in old times, were the possessions of their ancestors. ”

“ In looking back, then, by the aid of the authority just mentioned, along with others, on the progress made by the Highlands during the latter half of the eighteenth century, while there is much to sadden, still there is much that is cheering. The people generally appear in a state of ferment and discontent with themselves, and doing their best blindly to grope their way to a better position. ”

“ In this spirit, the Highland peasant has a hereditary right to his hut—a right derived from God—but kings have given our feudal lords, even in the nineteenth century, a power over the land on which the hut is built; and at their behest whole villages are demolished, and the people swept away with a heartless barbarity sufficient to call down the lasting vengeance of heaven on the ignoble dukes and canting marquises of the northern and western Highlands! ”

“ But there is the Highlands and the language and the music, 365the scattered literature and half-Anglicised people, and if Highlanders with a craze for organising will but think on these things and build up some organisation that will become the natural rallying point of everything Highland, it is not yet too late to let the world see that the Scottish Highlands has a history and a literature worthy of a far higher place among the nations of the earth than the earth has yet given them. ”

“ Depopulation and emigration went on even more vigorously than before. Nearly all the old lairds and those imbued with the ancient spirit of the chiefs had died out, and a young and new race had now the disposal of the Highland lands, a race who had little sympathy with the feelings and prejudices of the people, and who were, naturally, mainly anxious to increase as largely as possible their rent-roll. ”

“ Highlands only about a hundred years since, was commenced in the lowlands and elsewhere centuries ago; the Highlanders have had improvements thrust upon them, while the lowlanders were allowed to develope themselves.
After the decline in the price of kelp (about 1820) , when it ceased to be the interest of the proprietors to accumulate people on the shore, they did their best to induce them to emigrate, many proprietors helping to provide ships for those whom they had dispossessed of their lands and farms. ”

“ After the labours of the day, the young people dance merrily on the green, and the old folk look on and regret that their own legs are too stiff to keep time to the fiddles. Certain Highland landlords might also read with advantage the exquisitely pathetic lines in which the poet pictures the desolation and ruin of the rural paradise, and perhaps conclude therefrom that, when glen and strath are depleted of their inhabitants, and these latter driven over the seas{109} to seek a foothold in strange lands, it is the very heart's blood of Britain that is being drained away. ”

“ The wails of the bards over Highland depopulation, however, nursed the people’s discontent as well as their resolution to assert themselves. A good proportion of the authors whose compositions come under notice in this chapter come under the spell of the Celtic Renaissance. Indeed this spirit of national resurrection [293] is the vital force pervading their productions which would be poor and barren without it. ”

“ J. F. Campbell of Islay, than whom none knew the Highlands better, “among the peasantry of many countries, and this trip through the Highlands has but confirmed my old impressions. The poorest Highlander is ever readiest to share the best he has with the stranger. A kind word is never thrown away, and whatever may be the faults of this people, I have never found a boor or a churl in a Highland bothy.” Besides, the ancient Gaels were very fond of music, 17whether in a merry or a sad humour. ”

“ Dear Sir, I have been for several years trying to reconcile my mind to the Colonizing of Africans in Liberia, but there have always been, and there still remain great and insurmountable objections against the scheme. We are an unlettered people, brought up in ignorance, not one in a hundred can read or write, not one in a thousand has a liberal education; is there any fitness for such to be sent into a far country, among heathens, to convert or civilize them, when they themselves are neither civilized or christianized? ”

“ The man who would not fight under our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in the glorious and heavenly cause of freedom and of God—to be delivered from the most wretched, abject and servile slavery, that ever a people was afflicted with since the foundation of the world, to the present day—ought to be kept with all of his children or family, in slavery, or in chains, to be butchered by his cruel enemies. ”