ommissioners of shires,
commissioners of burghs, would with one voice have demanded a strict
investigation into that great crime. It is certain, however, that no
motion for investigation was made. The state of the Gaelic clans was
indeed taken into consideration. A law was passed for the more effectual
suppressing of depredations and outrages beyond the Highland line; and
in that law was inserted a special proviso reserving to Mac Callum More
his hereditary jurisdiction. But it does not appear, either from the
public records of the proceedings of the Estates, or from those private
letters in which Johnstone regularly gave Carstairs an account of what
had passed, that any speaker made any allusion to the fate of Mac
Ian and his kinsmen. [419] The only explanation of this extraordinary
silence seems to be that the public men who were assembled in the
capital of Scotland knew little and cared little about the fate of a
thieving tribe of Celts. The injured clan, bowed down by fear of
the allpowerful Campbells, and little accustomed to resort to the
constituted authorities of the kingdom for protection or redress,
presented no petition to the Estates. The story of the butchery had
been told at coffeehouses, but had been told in different ways. Very
recently, one or two books, in which the facts were but too truly
related, had come forth from the secret presses of London. But those
books were not publicly exposed to sale. They bore the name of no
responsible author. The Jacobite writers were, as a class, savagely
malignant and utterly regardless of truth. Since the Macdonalds did
not complain, a prudent man might naturally be unwilling to incur the
displeasure of the King, of the ministers, and of the most powerful
family in Scotland, by bringing forward an accusation grounded on
nothing but reports wandering from mouth to mouth, or pamphlets which no
licenser had approved, to which no author had put his name, and which no
bookseller ventured to place in his shop-window. But whether this be
or be not the true solution, it is certain that the Estates separated
quietly after a session of two months, during which, as far as can
now be discovered, the name of Glencoe was not once uttered in the
Parliament House.

CHAPTER XX

State of the Court of Saint Germains--Feeling of the Jacobites;
Compounders and Noncompounders--Change of Ministry at Saint Germains;
Middleton--New Declaration put forth by James--Effect of the ne