uctions to shoot upon the spot any one seen wearing the Highland
garb, and this as late as September, 1750. This law and other laws made
at the same time were unnecessarily severe.

However impartial or fair a traveller may be his statements are not to
be accepted without due caution. He narrates that which most forcibly
attracts his attention, being ever careful to search out that which he
desires. Yet, to a certain extent, dependence must be placed in his
observations. From certain travellers are gleaned fearful pictures of
the Highlanders during the eighteenth century, written without a due
consideration of the underlying causes. The power of the chiefs had been
weakened, while the law was still impotent, many of them were in exile
and their estates forfeited, and landlords, in not a few instances,
placed over the clansmen, who were inimical to their best interests. As
has been noticed, in 1746 the country was ravaged and pitiless
oppression followed. Destruction and misery everywhere abounded. To
judge a former condition of a people by their present extremity affords
a distorted view of the picture.

Fire and sword, war and rapine, desolation and atrocity, perpetrated
upon a high-spirited and generous people, cannot conduce to the best
moral condition. Left in poverty and galled by outrage, wrongs will be
resorted to which otherwise would be foreign to a natural disposition.
If the influences of a more refined age had not penetrated the remote
glens, then a rougher reprisal must be expected. The coarseness, vice,
rapacity, and inhumanity of the oppressor must of necessity have a
corresponding influence on their better natures. If to this it be added
that some of the chiefs were naturally fierce, the origin of the sad
features could readily be determined. Whatever vices practiced or wrongs
perpetrated, the example was set before them by their more powerful and
better conditioned neighbors. Among the crimes enumerated is that some
of the chiefs increased their scanty incomes by kidnapping boys or men,
whom they sold as slaves to the American planters. If this be true, and
in all probability it was, there must have been confederates engaged in
maritime pursuits. But they did not have far to go for this lesson, for
this nefarious trade was taught them, at their very doors, by the
merchants of Aberdeen, who were "noted for a scandalous system of
decoying young boys from the country and selling them as slaves to the
plan