d the
Highland chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case
of Sutherland at least, to carry its rude equalizing remedy along with
it. Between the years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of
this northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, by
means for which we would in vain seek a precedent, except, perchance,
in the history of the Irish massacre. But though the interior of the
county was thus _improved_ into a desert, in which there are many
thousands of sheep, but few human habitations, let it not be supposed
by the reader that its general population, was in any degree lessened.
So far was this from being the case, that the census of 1821 showed an
increase over the census of 1811 of more than two hundred; and the
present population of Sutherland exceeds, by a thousand, its
population before the change. The county has not been depopulated--its
population has been merely arranged after a new fashion. The late
Duchess found it spread equally over the interior and the sea-coast,
and in very comfortable circumstances;--she left it compressed into a
wretched selvage of poverty and suffering, that fringes the county on
its eastern and western shores. And the law which enabled her to make
such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights of the poor Highlander,
is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own clumsy way, to make her
family pay the penalty. The evil of a poor-law can be no longer
averted from Scotland. However much we may dislike compulsory
assessment for the support of our poor, it can be no longer avoided.
Our aristocracy have been working hard for it during the whole of the
present century, and a little longer; the disruption of the Scottish
Church, as the last in a series of events, all of which have tended
towards it, has rendered it inevitable. Let the evidence of the
present commissioners on the subject be what it may, it cannot be of a
kind suited to show that if England should have a poor-law, Scotland
should have none. The southern kingdom must and will give us a
poor-law; and then shall the selvage of deep poverty which fringes the
sea-coasts of Sutherland avenge on the titled proprietor of the county
both his mother's error and his own. If our British laws, unlike
those of Switzerland, failed miserably in _her_ day in protecting the
vassal, they will more than fail, in those of her successor, in
protecting the lord. Our political economists shall have an
opport