up their time-honoured trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.[1] This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart[2] and James Anderson.[3] In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns.[4] As an example of the method[5] obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved,
- ↑ l. c., p. 182.
- ↑ Steuart says: “If you compare the rent of these lands” (he erroneously includes in this economic category the tribute of the taskmen to the clan-chief) “with the extent, it appears very small. If you compare it with the numbers fed upon the farm, you will find that an estate in the Highlands maintains, perhaps, ten times as many people as another of the same value in a good and fertile province.” ‘(l. c., vol. i., ch. xvi., p. 104.)
- ↑ James Anderson: Observations on the means of exciting a spirit of National Industry, &c. Edinburgh, 1777.
- ↑ In 1860 the people expropriated by force were exported to Canada under false pretences. Some fled to the mountains and neighbouring islands. They were followed by the police, came to blows with them and escaped.
- ↑ “In the Highlands of Scotland,” says Buchanan, the commentator on Adam Smith, 1814, “the ancient state of property is daily subverted.… The landlord, without regard to the hereditary tenant (a category used in error here), now offers his land to the highest bidder, who, if he is an improver, instantly adopts a new system of cultivation. The land, formerly overspread with small tenants or labourers, was peopled in proportion to its produce, but under the new system of improved cultivation and increased rents, the largest possible produce is obtained at the least possible expense: and the useless hands being, with this view, removed, the population is reduced, not to what the land will maintain, but to what it will employ. The dispossessed tenants either seek a subsistence in the neighbouring towns,” &c. ({{subst:al|David Buchanan}}: Observations on, &c., A. Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Edinburgh, 1814, vol. iv., p. 144.) “The Scotch grandees dispossessed families as they would grub up coppice-wood, and they treated villages and their people as Indians harassed with wild beasts do, in their vengeance, a jungle with tigers.… Man is bartered for a fleece or a carcase of mutton, nay, held cheaper.… Why, how much worse is it than the intention of the Moguls, who, when they had broken into the northern provinces of China, proposed in council to exterminate the inhabitants, and convert the land into pasture. This proposal many Highland proprietors have effected in their own country against their own countrymen.” ({{subst:al|George Ensor}}: An inquiry concerning the population of nations. Lond., 1818, pp, 215, 216.)
