on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 8000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6000 acres on the sea-shore—2 acres per family. The 6000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clan-land she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the sea-shore, tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.[1]
But the brave Gaels must expiate yet more bitterly their idolatry, romantic and of the mountains, for the “great men” of the clan. The smell of their fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the seashore to the great fishmongers of London. For the second time the Gaels were hunted out.[2]
- ↑ When the present Duchess of Sutherland entertained {{subst:al|Harriet Beecher Stowe|Mrs. Beecher Stowe}}, authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” with great magnificence in London, to show her sympathy for the negro slaves of the American republic—a sympathy that she prudently forgot, with her fellow-aristocrats, during the civil war, in which every “noble” English heart beat for the slave-owner—I gave in the “New York Tribune” the facts about the Sutherland slaves. (Epitomised in part by {{subst:al|Henry Charles Carey|Carey}} in The Slave Trade. London, 1853, p. 202, 203.) My article was reprinted in a Scotch newspaper, and led to a pretty polemic between the latter and the sycophants of the Sutherlands.
- ↑ Interesting details on this fish trade will be found in Mr. {{subst:al|David Urquhart}}’s
