n beings by
wholesale eviction. The thought of these poor thatched houses burning
{67} and the people driven away to find refuge where they could--in the
slums of Glasgow or across the seas--is to our minds so intolerable
that many will deny such crimes were ever perpetrated. Yet they were
perpetrated. The hearthstones on which the peat fires unceasingly
burned, which for generations had never grown cold, were left to the
rain and the snow. Some parishes were laid wholly waste. In one such
parish which I know, out of which sixty-one officers bearing their
King's commission went forth to fight in the Napoleonic wars, there has
gone forth hardly one officer to-day. Where hundreds were found of old
in the day of need, a mere handful of ghillies or shepherds is found
to-day who can take up arms. For that parish which gave Scotland the
greatest family of preachers and leaders in religious and social
movements was laid ruthlessly waste, and the parish minister, who held
all the honours which his Church and country could bestow on him, was
left in his manse solitary {68} amid the wilderness which greed
created, to die of a broken heart. That most beautiful of islands--the
Isle of Skye--sent forth 21 generals, 48 colonels, 600 commissioned
officers, 10,000 soldiers to fight in the great wars for human freedom
against the Corsican; to-day the Isle of Skye can scarcely muster 1000
in the greatest crisis of human history. One parish in the western
sea-board which sent 200 men to fight for freedom in the Napoleonic
wars to-day could only muster six; for the parish fell into the hands
of a man who wanted a deer forest for the passing of his leisure hours.
These figures are but representative of what has happened all over the
British Isles. An old man, who was carried as a child in the corner of
a plaid out of his native glen when the cataclysm of eviction burst on
the unbelieving crofters and cottars, while cottage after cottage was
given to the flames, when asked what he remembered about it, answered:
'I can see yet the smoke rising to heaven; and I can hear {69} the
sound of weeping down the glen.' In my boyhood's days I heard an old
man speaking of the townships of his youth being laid waste, and he
said: 'I remember it as one remembers things seen in a dream.' There
are many books in which those who may desire can inform themselves of
the depths to which it is possible for greed and tyrannous power to
bring men who ha