But in at least the ma.s.s, religion has not been influential among the governing cla.s.ses in Britain since the days of the Commonwealth. It has formed one of the great forces on which they have calculated--a formidable power among the people, that they have striven, according to the nature of the emergency, to quiet or awaken, bias or control,--now for the ends of party, when an antagonist faction had to be overborne and put down,--now for the general benefit of the country, when a foreign enemy had to be repelled or an intestine discord to be suppressed; but it has been peculiarly a force outside the governing cla.s.ses--external, not internal, to them,--a power which it has been their special work to regulate and direct, not a power which has regulated and directed them. The last British Government which--G.o.d, according to Bacon, having done much for it--laboured earnestly to do much for G.o.d, was that very remarkable one which centred in the person of the Lord Protector.
Hence naturally much that is unsatisfactory to the comparatively religious middle cla.s.ses of the country, in the conduct, with regard to religious questions, of the cla.s.ses on whom devolves the work of legislation. There is no real community of feeling and belief in these matters between the two. To the extent to which religion is involved in the legislative enactments of the time, the middle cla.s.s is in reality not represented, and the upper cla.s.s does not represent. It may not seem equally obvious, however, how there should be a lack of representation, not only among our members of Parliament, but also among our members of Council. They at least surely belong, it may be said, to the middle cla.s.ses, by whom and from among whom they are chosen for their office. Certainly in some cases they do; in many others, however, they form a cla.s.s scarce less peculiar than those upper cla.s.ses out of which the legislators of the country come to be drawn, simply because there is no other cla.s.s in the field out of which they can be selected.
The Reform and Munic.i.p.ality Bills wrought a mighty change in the Town Councils of the kingdom. The old close burgh system, with all its abuses, ceased for ever, save in its remains--monumental debts, and everlasting leases of town lands, granted on easy terms to officials and their friends; and droll recollections, like those embalmed by Galt in our literature, of solid munic.i.p.al feasting, and not so solid munic.i.p.al services,--of exclusive cliqueships, misemployed patronages, modest self-elections,--in short, of a general practice of jobbing, more palpable than pleasant, and that tended rather to individual advantage than corporate honour. The old men retired, and a set of new men were elevated by newly-created const.i.tuencies into their vacated places, to be disinterested on dilapidated means, and noisy on short commons. The days of long and heavy feasts had come to a close, and the days of long and heavy speeches succeeded. No two events which this world of ours ever saw, led to so vast an amount of bad speaking as the one Reform Bill that swept away the rotten burghs, and the other Reform Bill that opened the close ones. By and by, however, it came to be seen that the old, privileged, self-elected cla.s.s were succeeded in many instances by a cla.s.s that, though elected by their neighbours, were yet not quite like their neighbours. Their neighbours were men who, with their own personal business to attend to, had neither the time nor the ambition to be moving motions or speaking speeches in the eye of the public, and who could not take the trouble to secure elections by canva.s.sing voters. The men who had the time, and took the trouble, were generally a cla.s.s ill-hafted in society, who had high notions of reforming everything save themselves, and of keeping right all kinds of businesses except their own. The old state of things was, notwithstanding its many faults, a state under which our Scotch burghers rose into consideration by arts of comparative solidity. A tradesman or shopkeeper looked well to his business,--became an important man in the market-place and a good man in the bank,--increased in weight in the same proportion that his coffers did so, and grew influential and oracular on the strength of his pounds sterling per annum. With altered times, however, there arose a new order of men,--
"The wits of Charles found easier ways to fame."
It was no longer necessary to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring money and character: a glib tongue, a few high professions of public principle, and a few weeks" canva.s.sing, were found to serve the turn more than equally well.
There commenced straightway a new dynasty of dignities and honours.
Councillors got into print in the capacity of speechmakers, who, save for the revolution effected, would never have got into print in any other capacity than, mayhap, that of bankrupts in the Gazette.
Eloquent men walked to church in scarlet, greatly distinguished as provosts and bailies, who but for the happy change would have crept unseen all their lives long among the crowd. Members of Parliament went arm-in-arm, when they visited their const.i.tuencies, with folk altogether unused to such consideration; and when a burgher"s son sought to be promoted to the excise, or a seaman to the coast-guard service, it was through the new men that influence had to be exerted.
And of course the new men had to approve themselves worthy of their honours, by making large sacrifices for the public weal. They had in many cases not much to do: the magistracy of the bygone school, whom they succeeded, had obligingly relieved posterity of the trouble of having a too preponderous amount of munic.i.p.al property to manage and look after; but if they had not much to do, they had at least a great deal to say; and as they were ambitious of saying it, their own individual concerns were not unfrequently neglected, in order that their const.i.tuencies might be edified and informed. In cases not a few, the natural consequences ensued. We have in our eye one special burgh in the north, in which every name in the Town Council, from that of the provost down to that of the humblest councillor, had, in the course of some two or three years, appeared also in the _Gazette_; and the previous provost of the place had got desperately involved with the branch banks of the district, and had ultimately run the country, to avoid a prosecution for forgery.
Let it not be held that we are including the entire tribe of modern town functionaries in one sweeping condemnatory description. We ourselves, in our time (we refer to the fact with a high but surely natural pride), held office as a town councillor, under the modern _regime_, for the s.p.a.ce of three whole years in a parliamentary burgh that contained no fewer than forty voters. All may learn from history how it was that Bailie Weezle earned his munic.i.p.al honours during the ancient state of things in the famous burgh of Gudetown. "Bailie Weezle," says Galt, "was a man not overladen with worldly wisdom, and had been chosen into the Council princ.i.p.ally on account of being easily managed. Being an idle person living on his money, and of a soft and quiet nature, he was, for the reason aforesaid, taken by one consent among us, where he always voted on the provost"s side; for in controverted questions every one is beholden to take a part, and the bailie thought it was his duty to side with the chief magistrate." Our own special qualifications for office were, we must be permitted in justice to ourselves to state, different from Bailie Weezle"s by a shade.
It was generally held, that if there was nothing to do we would _do_ nothing, and if nothing to say we would _say_ nothing; and so thoroughly did we fulfil every expectation that had been previously formed of us, that for three years together we said and did nothing in our official capacity with great _eclat_, and regularly absented ourselves from every meeting of Council except the first, to the entire satisfaction of our const.i.tuency. It will not be held, therefore, in the face of so important a fact, that we include in our description all the town magistracies under the existing state of things, and most certainly not all modern town councillors.
Nothing, however, can be more certain, we repeat, than that they differ from their const.i.tuencies as a cla.s.s, and that they are chosen to represent them in munic.i.p.al affairs, just as another and higher cla.s.s is chosen to represent them in the Legislature--merely because there is no other cla.s.s in the field. The solid middle-cla.s.s men of business have, as has been said, something else to employ them, and cannot spare their services. They cannot accept of mere notoriety, with mayhap a modic.u.m of patronate influence attached, as an adequate price for the time and labour which their own affairs demand. It is a peculiar cla.s.s in the munic.i.p.al as in the literary field, that "weigh solid pudding against empty praise," and come to regard the empty praise as solid enough to outweigh the pudding. Not but that it is a fine thing to be in a Town Council, and to see one"s fortnightly speeches flourishing in the public prints. Where else could some of our Edinburgh worthies bring themselves so prominently before the eyes of the country?
Where else, for instance, could Councillor ---- impart such universal interest to the fact that he taught in a Sabbath school, and rode out of town every evening to attend to its duties by a Sunday train,--thus forming an invariable item, it would seem, in the average of the ninety-two Sabbath journeyers that travelled by the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, and failed to remunerate the proprietors? Or where else could Councillor ---- refer with such prodigious effect to Dr.
Chalmers"s b.l.o.o.d.y-minded scheme of "_executing_ the heathen?" Or where else could Councillor ---- succeed in eliciting so general a belief that he was one of the poor endangered heathens over which the threatened _execution_ hung, through his famous oath "By Jupiter?"
By the way, is this latter gentleman acquainted with Smollett"s story of the eccentric Mr. H., and chivalrously bent, on the same principle, in acknowledging a deity in distress? "Mr. H., some years ago, being in the Campidoglio at Rome," says Smollett, "made up to the bust of Jupiter, and bowing very low, exclaimed, in the Italian language, "I hope, sir, if ever you get your head above water again, you will remember that I paid my respects to you in your adversity." This sally," continues the historian, "was reported to the Cardinal Camerlengo, and by him laid before the Pope Benedict XIV., who could not help laughing at the extravagance of the address, and said to the Cardinal, "Those English heretics think they have a right to go to the devil in their own way.""
Now, standing, as we do, either on the threshold of serious national controversies of a religious bearing, or already entered upon them, it would be well to mark and test the facts which it is our present object specially to point out. It would be well to take measures for rendering it an as palpable as it is a solid truth, that the munic.i.p.al _tail_ of the country"s representation no more really represents it in several very important respects than its parliamentary _head_. It represents it most inadequately on the Sabbath question now; it will represent it quite as inadequately in the Popish endowment question by and by; and if in reality we do not wish to see the battle going against us on both issues, there must be effective means employed to demonstrate the fact. In matters of a religious bearing, the ill-hafted notoriety-men of our Town Councils much more nearly resemble the upper indifferent cla.s.ses, from which our legislators are drafted, than they do the solid bulk of the community.
They are decidedly in the movement party, and form a portion, not of the ballast, but of the superfluous sail, of the State. Nor should it be difficult to render the fact evident to all. In one of our northern burghs--Dingwall--a majority of the Town Council lately memorialized the Directors of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway in exactly the same vein as the majority of our Edinburgh Town Council. So extreme a step seemed rather extraordinary for Ross-shire; and a gentleman of the burgh, one of the voters, convinced that the officials were far indeed from representing their const.i.tuency, shrewdly set himself to demonstrate the real state of the case. First he possessed himself of an accredited list of the voters; and then, with a memorial addressed to the Directors, strongly condemnatory of the conduct of the Council, he called upon every voter in the burgh who had not taken the opposite side in the character of a councillor, with the exception of two, whose views he had previously ascertained to be unfavourable. And what, thinks our reader, was the result? Seven councillors had voted on the anti-Sabbatarian side; and the provost, for himself and the Council, had afterwards signed the memorial. And of the voters outside, four were found to make common cause with them. Two more did not make common cause with them, but were not prepared to condemn them, and so did not sign. There were thus fourteen in all who were either not opposed to the running of Sabbath trains, or who were at least not disposed openly to denounce the parties who had memorialized the Directors, in the name of the burgh, to the effect that Sabbath trains should be run. Of the other electors, ten were non-resident, five more were out of town at the time, three had fallen out of possession since the roll had been made up, and one was dead. And all the others, amounting to sixty-nine in number, at once signed the doc.u.ment condemnatory of the Council, and were happy to have an opportunity of doing so. The available votes of the burgh were opposed to those of their pseudo-representatives in the proportion of nearly six to one.
In the parliamentary burgh of Cromarty an almost similar experiment was made. There, however, though the movement party had composed the majority of the Council only a few years since, they had been cast out of office, partly through a strong reaction which had taken place against them, partly in consequence of a quarrel among themselves. And so the existing Town Council took the initiative in memorializing the Directors in favour of the recent resolution not to run Sunday trains.
Of all the voters of the burgh, only five stood aloof; all the others made common cause with the Town Council in attaching their names to their doc.u.ment.
But it is a significant fact, that in the knot of five the ex-councillors of the movement party were included; and that had _they_ been in the Council still, a majority would to a certainty have voted in the wake of the Edinburgh Town Council. There is much instruction in facts such as these; and they may be turned to great practical account.
Why should not the sentiments of every voter in Scotland be taken on this same Sabbath question now? or what is there to prevent us from taking the sentiments of every voter in Scotland on the Popish endowment question by and by?
It is a tedious and expensive matter to get up pet.i.tions, to which all and sundry affix their names; but the franchise-holders of Scotland are comparatively a not very numerous cla.s.s; and about the same amount of labour that goes to a monthly collection for the Sustentation Fund, would be quite sufficient to place before Government and the country the full expression of _their_ feelings and opinions on the two leading questions of the day. But enough for the present--"a word to the wise."
_January 20, 1847._
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS;{1}
OR, HOW A COUNTRY MAY BE RUINED.
CHAPTER I.
There appeared at Paris, about five years ago, a singularly ingenious work on political economy, from the pen of the late M. de Sismondi, a writer of European reputation. The greater part of the first volume is taken up with discussions on territorial wealth, and the condition of the cultivators of the soil; and in this portion of the work there is a prominent place a.s.signed to a subject which perhaps few Scotch readers would expect to see introduced through the medium of a foreign tongue to the people of a great continental State. We find this philosophic writer, whose works are known far beyond the limits of his language, devoting an entire essay to the case of the late d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland and her tenants, and forming a judgment on it very unlike the decision of political economists in our own country, who have not hesitated to characterize her great and singularly harsh experiment, whose worst effects we are but beginning to see, as at once justifiable in itself and happy in its results. It is curious to observe how deeds done as if in darkness and a corner, are beginning, after the lapse of nearly thirty years, to be proclaimed on the house-tops. The experiment of the late d.u.c.h.ess was not intended to be made in the eye of Europe. Its details would ill bear the exposure.
When Cobbett simply referred to it only ten years ago, the n.o.ble proprietrix was startled, as if a rather delicate family secret was on the eve of being divulged; and yet nothing seems more evident now than that civilised man all over the world is to be made aware of how the experiment was accomplished, and what it is ultimately to produce. It must be obvious, further, that the infatuation of the present proprietor, in virtually setting aside the Toleration Act on his property, must have the effect of spreading the knowledge of it all the more widely, and of rendering its results much more disastrous than they could have possibly been of themselves.
In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of Sutherland, is an argument at which proprietors may afford to smile.
In a time of revolution, however, when lands change their owners, and old families give place to new ones, it might be found somewhat formidable,--sufficiently so, at least, to lead a wise proprietor in an unsettled age rather to conciliate than oppress and irritate the cla.s.s who would be able in such circ.u.mstances to urge it with most effect. It is not easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts and reasonings of an elaborate essay; but the line of the argument runs somewhat thus.
Under the old Celtic tenures--the only tenures, be it remembered, through which the lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their lands--the _Klaan_, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of the soil: "the whole of Sutherland," says Sismondi, belonged to "the men of Sutherland." Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute monarch he was. "He gave the different _tacks_ of land to his officers, or took them away from them, according as they showed themselves more or less useful in war. But though he could thus, in a military sense, reward or punish the clan, he could not diminish in the least the property of the clan itself;"--he was a chief, not a proprietor, and had "no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of his kingdom." "Now, the Gaelic tenant," continues the Frenchman, "has never been conquered; nor did he forfeit, on any after occasion, the rights which he originally possessed;"--in point of right, he is still a co-proprietor with his captain. To a Scotchman acquainted with the law of property as it has existed among us, in even the Highlands, for the last century, and everywhere else for at least two centuries more, the view may seem extreme; not so, however, to a native of the Continent, in many parts of which prescription and custom are found ranged, not on the side of the chief, but on that of the va.s.sal. "Switzerland," says Sismondi, "which in so many respects resembles Scotland--in its lakes--its mountains--its climate--and the character, manners, and habits of its children--was likewise at the same period parcelled out among a small number of lords. If the Counts of Kyburgh, of Lentzburg, of Hapsburg, and of Gruyeres, had been protected by the English laws, they would find themselves at the present day precisely in the condition in which the Earls of Sutherland were twenty years ago. Some of them would perhaps have had the same taste for _improvements_, and several republics would have been expelled from the Alps, to make room for flocks of sheep." "But while the law has given to the Swiss peasant a guarantee of perpetuity, it is to the Scottish laird that it has extended this guarantee in the British empire, leaving the peasant in a precarious situation." "The clan--recognised at first by the captain, whom they followed in war and obeyed for their common advantage, as his friends and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his va.s.sals, then as his farmers--he has come finally to regard as hired labourers, whom he may perchance allow to remain on the soil of their common country for his own advantage, but whom he has the power to expel so soon as he no longer finds it for his interest to keep them."
Arguments like those of Sismondi, however much their force may be felt on the Continent, could be formidable at home, as we have said, in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society would be unfixed, and opinion set loose, to pull down or reconstruct at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so much less, and the Highland chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case of Sutherland at least, to carry its rude equalizing remedy along with it. Between the years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of this northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, by means for which we would in vain seek a precedent, except, perchance, in the history of the Irish ma.s.sacre. But though the interior of the county was thus _improved_ into a desert, in which there are many thousands of sheep, but few human habitations, let it not be supposed by the reader that its general population, was in any degree lessened.
So far was this from being the case, that the census of 1821 showed an increase over the census of 1811 of more than two hundred; and the present population of Sutherland exceeds, by a thousand, its population before the change. The county has not been depopulated--its population has been merely arranged after a new fashion. The late d.u.c.h.ess found it spread equally over the interior and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circ.u.mstances;--she left it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suffering, that fringes the county on its eastern and western sh.o.r.es. And the law which enabled her to make such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights of the poor Highlander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own clumsy way, to make her family pay the penalty. The evil of a poor-law can be no longer averted from Scotland. However much we may dislike compulsory a.s.sessment for the support of our poor, it can be no longer avoided.
Our aristocracy have been working hard for it during the whole of the present century, and a little longer; the disruption of the Scottish Church, as the last in a series of events, all of which have tended towards it, has rendered it inevitable. Let the evidence of the present commissioners on the subject be what it may, it cannot be of a kind suited to show that if England should have a poor-law, Scotland should have none. The southern kingdom must and will give us a poor-law; and then shall the selvage of deep poverty which fringes the sea-coasts of Sutherland avenge on the t.i.tled proprietor of the county both his mother"s error and his own. If our British laws, unlike those of Switzerland, failed miserably in _her_ day in protecting the va.s.sal, they will more than fail, in those of her successor, in protecting the lord. Our political economists shall have an opportunity of reducing their arguments regarding the improvements in Sutherland into a few arithmetical terms, which the merest tyro will be able to grapple with.
We find a similar case thus strongly stated by Cobbett in his _Northern Tour_, and in connection with a well-known name:--"Sir James Graham has his estate lying off this road to the left. He has not been _clearing_ his estate--the poor-law would not let him do that; but he has been clearing off the small farms, and making them into large ones, which he had a right to do, because it is he himself that is finally to endure the consequences of that: he has a right to do that; and those who are made indigent in consequence of his so doing, have a right to demand a maintenance out of the land, according to the Act of the 43d of Elizabeth, which gave the people a COMPENSATION for the loss of the t.i.thes and church lands which had been taken away by the aristocracy in the reigns of the Tudors. If Sir James Graham choose to mould his fine and large estate into immense farms, and to break up numerous happy families in the middle rank of life, and to expose them all to the necessity of coming and demanding sustenance from his estate; if he choose to be surrounded by ma.s.ses of persons in this state, he shall not call them _paupers_, for that insolent term is not to be found in the compensation-laws of Elizabeth; if he choose to be surrounded by swarms of beings of this description, with feelings in their bosoms towards him such as I need not describe,--if he choose this, his RIGHT certainly extends thus far; but I tell him that he has no right to say to any man born in his parishes, "You shall not be here, and you shall not have a maintenance off these lands.""
There is but poor comfort, however, to know, when one sees a country ruined, that the perpetrators of the mischief have not ruined it to their own advantage. We purpose showing how signal in the case of Sutherland this ruin has been, and how very extreme the infatuation which continues to possess its hereditary lord. We are old enough to remember the county in its original state, when it was at once the happiest and one of the most exemplary districts in Scotland, and pa.s.sed, at two several periods, a considerable time among its hills; we are not unacquainted with it now, nor with its melancholy and dejected people, that wear out life in their comfortless cottages on the sea-sh.o.r.e. The problem solved in this remote district of the kingdom is not at all unworthy the attention which it seems but beginning to draw, but which is already not restricted to one kingdom, or even one continent.
{1} "I will go and inquire upon the spot whether the natives of the county of SUTHERLAND were driven from the land of their birth by the Countess of that name, and by her husband the Marquis of Stafford.... I wish to possess authentic information relative to that "CLEARING" affair; for though it took place twenty years ago, it may be just as necessary to inquire into it now. It may be quite proper to inquire into the means that were used to effect the CLEARING."--COBBETT.
"It is painful to dwell on this subject" [the present state of Sutherland]; "but as information communicated by men of honour, judgment, and perfect veracity, descriptive of what they daily witness, affords the best means of forming a correct judgment, and as these gentlemen, from their situations in life, have no immediate interest in the determination of the question, beyond what is dictated by humanity and a love of truth, their authority may be considered as undoubted."--GENERAL STEWART of Garth.
"It is by a cruel abuse of legal forms--it is by an unjust usurpation--that the _tacksman_ and the tenant of Sutherland are considered as having no right to the land which they have occupied for so many ages.... A count or earl has no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of his kingdom."--SISMONDI.
CHAPTER II.
We heard sermon in the open air with a poor Highland congregation in Sutherlandshire only a few weeks ago; and the scene was one which we shall not soon forget. The place of meeting was a green hill-side, near the opening of a deep, long withdrawing strath, with a river running through the midst. We stood on the slope where the last of a line of bold eminences, that form the southern side of the valley, sinks towards the sea. A tall precipitous mountain, reverend and h.o.a.ry, and well fitted to tranquillize the mind, from the sober solemnity that rests on its ma.s.sy features, rose fronting us on the north; a quiet burial-ground lay at its feet; while, on the opposite side, between us and the sea, there frowned an ancient stronghold of time-eaten stone--an impressive memorial of an age of violence and bloodshed. The last proprietor, says tradition, had to quit this dwelling by night, with all his family, in consequence of some unfortunate broil, and take refuge in a small coasting vessel; a terrible storm arose--the vessel foundered at sea--and the hapless proprietor and his children were nevermore heard of. And hence, it is said, the extinction of the race.
The story speaks of an unsettled time; nor is it difficult to trace, in the long deep valley on the opposite hand, the memorials of a story not less sad, though much more modern. On both sides the river the eye rests on a mult.i.tude of scattered patches of green, that seem inlaid in the brown heath. We trace on these islands of sward the marks of furrows, and mark here and there, through the loneliness, the remains of a group of cottages, well-nigh levelled with the soil, and, haply like those ruins which eastern conquerors leave in their track, still scathed with fire. All is solitude within the valley, except where, at wide intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen; but at its opening, where the hills range to the coast, the cottages for miles together lie cl.u.s.tered as in a hamlet. From the north of Helmsdale to the south of Port Gower, the lower slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, minute patches of corn, and endless cottages. It would seem as if for twenty miles the long withdrawing valley had been swept of its inhabitants, and the acc.u.mulated sweepings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is the present state of Sutherland. The interior is a solitude occupied by a few sheep-farmers and their hinds; while a more numerous population than fell to the share of the entire county, ere the inhabitants were expelled from their inland holdings, and left to squat upon the coast, occupy the selvage of discontent and poverty that fringes its sh.o.r.es. The congregation with which we worshipped on this occasion was drawn mainly from these cottages, and the neighbouring village of Helmsdale.
It consisted of from six to eight hundred Highlanders, all devoted adherents of the Free Church. We have rarely seen a more deeply serious a.s.semblage; never certainly one that bore an air of such deep dejection. The people were wonderfully clean and decent; for it is ill with Highlanders when they neglect their personal appearance, especially on a Sabbath; but it was all too evident that the heavy hand of poverty rested upon them, and that its evils were now deepened by oppression. It might be a mere trick of a.s.sociation; but when their plaintive Gaelic singing, so melancholy in its tones at all times, arose from the bare hill-side, it sounded in our ears like a deep wail of complaint and sorrow. Poor people! "We were ruined and reduced to beggary before," they say, "and now the gospel is taken from us."
Nine-tenths of the poor people of Sutherland are adherents of the Free Church--all of them in whose families the worship of G.o.d has been set up--all who entertain a serious belief in the reality of religion--all who are not the creatures of the proprietor, and have not stifled their convictions for a piece of bread--are devotedly attached to the disestablished ministers, and will endure none other.
The residuary clergy they do not recognise as clergy at all. The Established churches have become as useless in the district, as if, like its Druidical circles, they represented some idolatrous belief, long exploded--the people will not enter them; and they respectfully pet.i.tion his Grace to be permitted to build other churches for themselves. And fain would his Grace indulge them, he says. In accordance with the suggestions of an innate desire, willingly would he permit them to build their own churches and support their own ministers. But then, has he not loyally engaged to support the Establishment? To permit a religious and inoffensive people to build their own places of worship, and support their own clergy, would be sanctioning a sort of persecution against the Establishment; and as his Grace dislikes religious persecution, and has determined always to oppose whatever tends to it, he has resolved to make use of his influence, as the most extensive of Scottish proprietors, in forcing them back to their parish churches. If they persist in worshipping G.o.d agreeably to the dictates of their conscience, it must be on the unsheltered hill-side--in winter, amid the frosts and snows of a severe northern climate--in the milder seasons, exposed to the scorching sun and the drenching shower. They must not be permitted the shelter of a roof, for that would be persecuting the Establishment; and so to the Establishment must the people be forced back, literally by stress of weather. His Grace owes a debt to the national inst.i.tution, and it seems to irk his conscience until some equivalent be made. He is not himself a member--he exercises the same sort of liberty which his people would so fain exercise; and to make amends for daring to belong to another Church himself (that of England), he has determined, if he can help it, that the people shall belong to no other. He has resolved, it would seem, to compound for his own liberty by depriving them of theirs.
How they are to stand out the winter on this exposed eastern coast, He alone knows who never shuts His ear to the cry of the oppressed. One thing is certain, they will never return to the Establishment. On this Sabbath the congregation in the parish church did not, as we afterwards learned, exceed a score; and the _quoad sacra_ chapel of the district was locked up. Long before the Disruption the people had well-nigh ceased attending the ministrations of the parish inc.u.mbent.
The Sutherland Highlanders are still a devout people; they like a bald mediocre essay none the better for its being called a sermon, and read on Sabbath. The n.o.ble Duke, their landlord, has said not a little in his letters to them about the extreme slightness of the difference which obtains between the Free and the Established Churches: it is a difference so exceedingly slight, that his Grace fails to see it; and he hopes that by and by, when winter shall have thickened the atmosphere with its frost rime and its snows, his poor tenantry may prove as unable to see it as himself. With them, however, the difference is not mainly a doctrinal one. They believe with the old Earls of Sutherland, who did much to foster the belief in this northern county, that there is such a thing as personal piety,--that of two clergymen holding nominally the same doctrines, and bound ostensibly by the same standards, one may be a regenerate man, earnestly bent on the conversion of others, and ready to lay down his worldly possessions, and even life itself, for the cause of the gospel; while the other may be an unregenerate man, so little desirous of the conversion of others, that he would but decry and detest them did he find them converted already, and so careless of the gospel, that did not his living depend on professing to preach it, he would neither be an advocate for it himself, nor yet come within earshot of where it was advocated by others. The Highlanders of Sutherland hold in deep seriousness a belief of this character. They believe, further, that the ministers of their own mountain district belong to these two cla.s.ses--that the Disruption of the Scottish Church has thrown the cla.s.ses apart--that the residuaries are not men of personal piety--they have seen no conversions attending their ministry--nor have they lacked reason to deem them unconverted themselves. Unlike his Grace the Duke, the people have been intelligent enough to see two sets of principles ranged in decided antagonism in the Church question; but still more clearly have they seen two sets of men. They have identified the cause of the gospel with that of the-Free Church in their district; and neither the Duke of Sutherland nor the Establishment which he is "engaged in endeavouring to maintain," will be able to reverse the opinion.
We have said that his Grace"s ancestors, the old earls, did much to foster this spirit. The history of Sutherland, as a county, differs from all our other Highland districts. Its two great families were those of Reay and Sutherland, both of which, from an early period of the Reformation, were not only Protestant, but also thoroughly evangelical. It was the venerable Earl of Sutherland who first subscribed the National Covenant in the Greyfriars. It was a scion of the Reay family--a man of great personal piety--who led the troops of William against Dundee at Killiecrankie. Their influence was all-powerful in Sutherland, and directed to the best ends; and we find it stated by Captain Henderson, in his general view of the agriculture of the country, as a well-established and surely not uninteresting fact, that "the crimes of rapine, murder, and plunder, though not unusual in the county during the feuds and conflicts of the clans, were put an end to about the year 1640"--a full century before our other Highland districts had become even partially civilised. "Pious earls and barons of former times," says a native of the county, in a small work published in Edinburgh about sixteen years ago, "encouraged and patronized pious ministers, and a high tone of religious feeling came thus to be diffused throughout the country." Its piety was strongly of the Presbyterian type; and in no district of the south were the questions which received such prominence in our late ecclesiastical controversy better understood by both the people and the patrons, than in Sutherland a full century ago. We have before us an interesting doc.u.ment, the invitation of the elders, parishioners, and heritors of Lairg, to the Rev. Thomas M"Kay, 1748, to be their minister, in which, "hoping that" he would find their "call, carried on with great sincerity, unanimity, and order, to be a clear call from the Lord," they faithfully promise to "yield him, in their several stations and relations, all dutiful respect and encouragement."
William Earl of Sutherland was patron of the parish, but we find him on this occasion exercising no patronate powers: at the head of parishioners and elders he merely adhibits his name. He merely _invites_ with the others. The state of morals in the county was remarkably exemplified at a later period by the regiment of Sutherland Highlanders, embodied originally in 1793, under the name of the Sutherlandshire Fencibles, and subsequently in 1800 as the 93d Regiment. Most other troops are drawn from among the unsettled and reckless part of the population; not so the Sutherland Highlanders. On the breaking out of the revolutionary war, the mother of the present Duke summoned them from their hills, and five hundred fighting men marched down to Dunrobin Castle, to make a tender of their swords to their country, at the command of their chieftainess. The regiment, therefore, must be regarded as a fair specimen of the character of the district; and from the description of General Stewart of Garth, and one or two sources besides, we may learn what that character was.
"In the words of a general officer by whom they were once reviewed,"
says General Stewart, "they exhibited a perfect pattern of military discipline and moral rect.i.tude."
"When stationed at the Cape of Good Hope, anxious to enjoy the advantages of religious instruction agreeably to the tenets of their national Church, and there being no religious service in the garrison except the customary one of reading prayers to the soldiers on parade, the Sutherland men formed themselves into a congregation, appointed elders of their own number, engaged and paid a stipend (collected among themselves) to a clergyman of the Church of Scotland (who had gone out with an intention of teaching and preaching to the Caffres), and had divine service performed agreeably to the ritual of the Established Church.... In addition to these expenses, the soldiers regularly remitted money to their relatives in Sutherland. When they disembarked at Plymouth in August 1814, the inhabitants were both surprised and gratified. On such occasions it had been no uncommon thing for soldiers to spend in taverns and gin-shops the money they had saved. In the present case the soldiers of Sutherland were seen in book-sellers" shops, supplying themselves with Bibles and such books and tracts as they required. Yet, as at the Cape, where their religious habits were so free of all fanatical gloom that they occasionally indulged in social meetings and dancing, so here, while expending their money on books, they did not neglect their personal appearance; and the haberdashers" shops had also their share of trade, from the purchase of additional feathers to their bonnets, and such extra decorations as the correctness of military regulations allow to be introduced into the uniform. Nor, while thus mindful of themselves--improving their mind and their personal appearance--did such of them as had relations in Sutherland forget their dest.i.tute condition, _occasioned by the loss of their lands_, and the operation of the _improved state of the country_. During the short period that the regiment was quartered at Plymouth, upwards of 500 were lodged in one banking house to be remitted to Sutherland, exclusive of many sums sent through the Post Office and by officers. Some of the sums exceeded 20 from an individual soldier."