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In his work on the
Nationalisation of Land, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, in the chapter on
"Landlordism in Scotland," says to the English people:-
"The facts stated in this
chapter will possess, I feel sure, for many Englishmen, an almost
startling novelty; the tale of oppression and cruelty they reveal reads
like one of those hideous stories peculiar to the dark ages, rather than
a simple record of events happening upon our own land and within the
memory of the present generation. For a parallel to this monstrous power
of the landowner, under which life and property are entirely at his
mercy, we must go back to mediaeval, or to the days when serfdom not
having been abolished, the Russian noble was armed with despotic
authority; while the more pitiful results of this landlord tyranny, the
wide devastation of cultivated lands, the heartless burning of houses,
the reckless creation of pauperism and misery, out of well-being and
contentment, could only be expected under the rule of Turkish Sultans or
greedy and cruel Pashas. Yet these cruel deeds have been perpetrated in
one of the most beautiful portions of our native land. They are not the
work of uncultured barbarians or of fanatic Moslems, but of so-called
civilised and Christian men ; and—worst feature of all they are not due
to any high-handed exercise of power beyond the law, but are strictly
legal, are in many cases the acts of members of the Legislature itself,
and, notwithstanding that they have been repeatedly made known for at
least sixty years past, no steps have been taken, or are even proposed
to be taken, by the Legislature to prevent them for the future! Surely
it is time that the people of England should declare that such things
shall no longer exist that the rich shall no longer have such legal
power to oppress the poor—that the land shall be free for all who are
willing to pay a fair value for its use—and, as this is not possible
under landlordism, that landlordism shall be abolished. . . .
"The general results of
the system of modern landlordism in Scotland are not less painful than
the hardship and misery brought upon individual sufferers. The earlier
improvers, who drove the peasants from their sheltered valleys to the
exposed sea-coast, in order to make room for sheep and sheep farmers,
pleaded erroneously the public benefit as the justification of their
conduct. They maintained that more food and clothing would be produced
by the new system, and that the people themselves would have the
advantage of the produce of the sea as well as that of the land for
their support. The result, however, proved them to be mistaken, for
henceforth the cry of Highland destitution began to be heard,
culminating at intervals into actual famines, like that of 1836-37, when
£70,000 were distributed to keep the Highlanders from death by
starvation. . . . just as in Ireland, there was abundance of land
capable of cultivation, but the people were driven to the coast and to
the towns to make way for sheep, and cattle, and lowland farmers; and
when the barren and inhospitable tracts allotted to them became
overcrowded, they were told to emigrate. As the Rev. J. Macleod
says:—"By the clearances one part is depopulation and the other
overpopulated; the people are gathered into villages where there is no
steady employment for them, where idleness has its baneful influence and
lands them in penury and want.
"The actual effect of
this system of eviction and emigration—of banishing the native of the
soil and giving it to the stranger—is shown in the steady increase of
poverty indicated by the amount spent for the relief of the poor having
increased from less than £300,000 in 1846 to more than £900,000 now;
while in the same period the population has only increased from
2,770,000 to 3,627,000, so that pauperism has grown about nine times
faster than population! . . . . The fact that a whole population could
be driven from their homes like cattle at the will of a landlord, and
that the Government which taxed them, and for whom they freely shed
their blood on the battle-field, neither would nor could protect them
from cruel interference with their personal liberty, is surely the most
convincing and most absolute demonstration of the incompatibility of
landlordism with the elementary rights of a free people.
"As if, however, to prove
this still more clearly, and to show how absolutely incompatible with
the well-being of the community is modern landlordism, the great lords
of the soil in Scotland have for the last twenty years or more been
systematically laying waste enormous areas of land for purposes of
sport, just as the Norman Conqueror laid waste the area of the New
Forest for similar purposes. At the present time, more than two million
acres of Scottish soil are devoted to the preservation of deer alone—an
area larger than the entire Counties of Kent and Surrey combined. Glen
Tilt Forest includes 100,000 acres; the Black Mount is sixty miles in
circumference; and Ben Alder Forest is fifteen miles long by seven
broad. On many of these forests there is the finest pasture in Scotland,
while the valleys would support a considerable population of small
farmers, yet all this land is devoted to the sport of the wealthy, farms
being destroyed, houses pulled down, and men, sheep, and cattle all
banished to create a wilderness for the deer-stalkers! At the same time
the whole people of England are shut out from many of the grandest and
most interesting scenes of their native land, gamekeepers and watchers
forbidding the tourist or naturalist to trespass on some of the wildest
Scotch mountains.
"Now, when we remember
that the right to a property in these unenclosed mountains was most
unjustly given to the representatives of the Highland chiefs little more
than a century ago, and that they and their successors have grossly
abused their power ever since, it is surely time to assert those
fundamental maxims of jurisprudence which state that—"No man can have a
vested right in the misfortunes and woes of his country," and that "the
Sovereign ought not to allow either communities or private individuals
to acquire large tracts of land in order to leave it uncultivated." If
the oft-repeated maxim that "property has its duties as well as its
rights" is not altogether a mockery, then we maintain that in this case
the total neglect of all the duties devolving on the owners of these
vast tracts of land affords ample reason why the State should take
possession of them for the public benefit. A landlord government will,
of course, never do this till the people declare unmistakably that it
must be done. To such a government the rights of property are sacred,
while those of their fellow-citizens are of comparatively little moment;
but we feel sure that when the people fully know and understand the
doings of the landlords of Scotland, the reckless destruction of
homesteads, and the silent sufferings of the brave Highlanders, they
will make their will known, and, when they do so, that will must soon be
embodied into law."
After quoting the opinion
of the Rev. Dr. John Kennedy of Dingwall, given at length on other
pages, Mr. Wallace next quotes from an article in the Westminster
Review, in 1868. "The Gaels," this writer says, "rooted from the dawn of
history on the slopes of the northern mountains, have been thinned out
and thrown away like young turnips too thickly planted. Noble gentlemen
and noble ladies have shown a flintiness of heart and a meanness of
detail in carrying out their clearings, upon which it is revolting to
dwell; and after all, are the evils of over-population cured? Does not
the disease still spring up under the very torture of the knife? Are not
the crofts slowly and silently taken at every opportunity out of the
hands of the peasantry? When a Highlander has to leave his hut there is
now no resting-place for him save the cellars or attics of the closes of
Glasgow, or some other large centre of employment; it has been noticed
that the poor Gael is even more liable than the Irishman to sink under
the debasement in which he is then immersed." The same writer holds:—"No
error could be grosser than that of reviewing the chiefs as unlimited
proprietors not only of the land, but of the whole territory of the
mountain, lake, river, and sea-shore, held and won during hundreds of
years by the broad swords of the clansmen. Could any Maclean admit, even
in a dream, that his chief could clear Mull of all the Macleans and
replace them with Campbells; or the Mackintosh people his lands with
Macdonalds, and drive away his own race, any more than Louis Napoleon
could evict all the population of France and supply their place with
English and German colonists? "Yet this very power and right the English
Government, in its aristocratic selfishness, bestowed upon the chiefs,
when, after the great rebellion of 1745, it took away their privileges
of war and criminal jurisdiction, and endeavoured to assimilate them to
the nobles and great landowners of England. The rights of the clansmen
were left entirely out of consideration. [Land Nationalisation, its
Necessities and Aims; being a Cornparison of the System of Landlord and
Tenant with that of Occupying Ownership, in their influence on the
well-being of the People, by Alfred Russel Wallace, author of "The Malay
Archipelago," "Island Life," &c. London: Triibner & Co., 1882.] |
