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See Third Report of the Highland Society on Emigration.
The long detail of uninteresting circumstances
contained in the Report would be tedious if extracted at full length, and
a short summary of the material points will render them sufficiently
intelligible.
The ground of the whole is a complaint which is stated
to have been made by some tenants in Benbecula to the justices of the
peace, against two men of the names of M’Lean and M’Lellan, whom they
accused of having enticed them to sign agreements for going to America,of
the import of which they were not aware.
It must be observed by the way that allegations of this
kind are very frequently made by the common Highlanders without any
foundation. All written transactions are in the English language, which is
understood only by a small proportion of the people; and any one who
repents of a bargain he has made, has so obvious an excuse in this
pretence, that it ought always to be received with some degree of
jealousy. On this occasion, however, the justices seem to have been
perfectly well disposed to believe the tenants on their word.
It is further mentioned that M’Lean and M'Lellan had
conversed with the people assembled at a place of religious worship about
America, and among other observations had said, that they were not
troubled with landlords or factors, but that all
the people were happy, and on an equal footing, and that there were no
rents paid there. One of them also read a letter from a settler in Canada,
exhorting his countrymen to throw off the
yoke of bondage and the shackles of slavery, and to quit the land of Egypt
and come to this land of Canaan adding,
How can I say otherwise when I never knew what actual freedom or the
spirit of equality was till I came to Canada? We have wholesome
laws and impartial judges; we have the blessings of the gospel, and peace
in the midst of plenty.—Here are no landlord, no factor, no threatening
for your rents at Martinmas.
Such appears then, says the Reporter, to be the
train of sentiments, such the deceitful hopes, and
serious discontents, which the emigrant traders make a liberal use
of,—He goes on to comment on the circumstances above noticed, and to
observe that when to this traffic draws into its
service the preaching of sedition, and even the calumniating
landlords, factors, and still more the magirastry of the country, in such
a way as to irritate the people, and thereby put the public peace in
hazard, there is at common law, full power vested in the magistrate to
restrain and punish such irregularities.
Those who will not take the trouble of investigating
the real origin and effective causes of any evil they observe, are
generally inclined to cut the Gordian knot by some such short hand remedy
as this gentleman hints at.
A more accurate examination would have shown him, that
the circumstances on which he insists as the prime causes of the disorders
of the country are the mere symptoms of its morbid state. However mistaken
on this head, the reporter has given us facts that are important, as an
example of that irritation which has been already insisted on, as
prevalent among the lower orders in the Highlands, in consequence of the
change in the system of the country.
It cannot escape notice, that the language of M’Lean
and M’Lellan, however objectionable, derived all its force from the
previous existence of discontent in the minds of the people whom they
addressed. If the same language had seen used in the days of genuine
clanship, how differently would the people have received the idea of going
to a country, where they could have no protection from the chief/—The
topics of complaint brought forward are all founded on the peculiar
circumstances of the Highlands, and totally different from those which a
preacher of sedition in any other part of the kingdom would have dwelt
upon. Not a word is said of the Government or Laws of the kingdom; nothing
is spoken of but the harshness of the landlord, and the unusual burden of
rents.
The praises bestowed on the government and judicature
in Canada, may seem indeed to imply a censure on that of our own country;
but this would not be a fair construction, when we consider little the
advantages of the British constitution have yet reached to
these people.—This may not be understood by those who are accustomed to
the regular administration of justice in all the southern parts of the
kingdom, and who imagine that things are every where conducted in the same
manner.—The law, indeed, is the same as in the rest of Scotland; the
heritable jurisdictions are abolished nevertheless, the
circumstances of the Highlands still give the proprietors of land a degree
of power over their immediate dependants, which is not seen in the more
commercial parts of the kingdom. This cannot be said equally of
all the Highlands; for, in the southern and more
improved districts, things are approaching to a similarity with the rest
of Scotland but in remoter situations there is still a considerable
remnant of the arbitrary spirit of the feudal times.
From the observations that have been made on the
general state of society in the highlands, it will be understood
that no man can live there as an independent labourer; that every
inhabitant of the country is under an absolute necessity of obtaining a
possession of land; and as the competitors for such possessions are so
numerous that all cannot be accommodated, every one who is not determined
on quitting the country feels himself very much at the mercy of the
proprietor, on whom he depends for the means of remaining. To this is to
be added the poverty of the lower orders; the great extent of particular
estates; the remote insulated situation of many; their distance from the
ordinary courts of justice, and the great expense which must on that
account be incurred by an attempt to procure redress for any wrong. All
these circumstances combine to give a landlord in these remote situations
an extraordinary degree of personal weight; and the regular authority of a
magistrate being superadded, no individual among his dependants can
venture to contest his power.
The laws passed after the year 1745, for abolishing the
feudal jurisdictions in the Highlands, were certainly useful in so far as
they had an effect, but were of much less consequence than they have
sometimes been supposed. The substantial change on the state of the
Highiands has arisen from other circumstances already sufficiently
explained. To extend the spirit as well as the forms of the British
constitution through these remote distrjcts, it is necessary that the
progress which has been going on ever since the year
1745, should come to maturity; that a commercial order of
society should be fully established, and complete the subversion of the
feudal system.
In the present state of things, it is not perhaps too
much to say, that
in a great part of the Highlands the proper administration of justice
still depends less on the regular checks of law, than on the personal
character of the resident gentry. The power that is in their hands is in a
great proportion of the country exercised with a degree of moderation and
equity highly honourable to individual gentlemen; but unless the
proprietors of the Highlands were a race of angels, this could not be
without exceptions. Above all, when it is considered that many extensive
estates are scarcely visited by their owners once in the course of several
years, and that the almost despotic authority of the landlord is
transferred to the hands of underlings, who have no permanent interest in
the welfare of the people, it is not to be supposed that abuses will not
prevail; and that oppressions will not be practised.
The complaints of the common people are in many parts
as loud as they dare to utter them; but the instances of injustice which
they may occasionally experience, produce on their minds an aggravated
impression, from the great and constant sources of irritation arising out
of the general state of the country; and hence perhaps their complaints
are too indiscriminate.
That there is some ground, however, for complaint, does
not rest on the authority of the common people alone. In Knox’s Tour
through the Highlands, p. 191. we find the following remark on one of the
Hebrides
"The fishery of the island has long been monopolized by
the
factor, who pays the fishermen thirteen pounds
per ton for the ling, and gets, when sold on the spot, eighteen. When to
these advantages we add the various emoluments arising from his office,
and his traffic in grain, meal, cattle, etc. his place is better than the
rent
of many considerable estates in the Highlands."
It may perhaps be imagined that Mr. Knox, being a
stranger, has been misled by exaggerated representations; but this cannot
be supposed of the patriotic authority of the Agricultural Survey of the
Northern Counties of Scotland, who, in laying down a plan for the
management of a Highland estate, particularly insisting on the factors
being restrained from exacting services, accepting presents, or dealing as
drovers in the purchase of cattle, under any pretence whatever. p.
166,
Of the prevalence of abuses we have also the testimony
of a resident clergyman, Mr. Irvine, in his Inquiry into the causes and
effects of Emigration.
"‘Were it consistent," he says,
" with my inquiry, I would willingly pass over the conduct of the factors
in silence." p. 41.
"If a person is so unfortunate as to give any one of
them offence, no matter how, he either privately or publicly uses every
artifice to render him odious to his neighbours or his landlord, tili in
the end he finds it necessary to withdraw.
It would be tedious and irksome to enumerate the
various methods by which a factor may get rid of a person whom he hates,
or let in (as it is termed) one whom he loves." p.
42.
Mr. Irvine goes on with various other observations, and
concludes with saying:—"He that could
bear the tyranny of such masters, might have been born a Mahometan." p.
45.
The power with which the factors of many Highland
estates are invested, seems to carry with it temptations almost too great
for human nature: but though it is on
this class of men that the weight of popular odium chiefly falls, ought
not the blame in just reason to lie with those, who suffer such abuses to
be committed in their name?
Taking things, however, as we find them, it will not
appear extraordinary. that the crime, newly laid down in the code
of the Highland Society under the title of calumniating factors,
unknown as it is in the laws of England, should in some places be deemed
the most dangerous and unpardonable of all species of sedition. |
