far beyond the
reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings,--they
had defended them so well of old that the soil was still virgin
ground, in which the invader had found only a grave; and their young
men were now in foreign lands, fighting, at the command of their
chieftainess, the battles of their country, not in the character of
hired soldiers, but of men who regarded these very holdings as their
stake in the quarrel. To them, then, the scheme seemed fraught with
the most flagrant, the most monstrous injustice. Were it to be
suggested by some Chartist convention in a time of revolution, that
Sutherland might be still further improved--that it was really a piece
of great waste to suffer the revenues of so extensive a district to be
squandered by one individual--that it would be better to appropriate
them to the use of the community in general--that the community in
general might be still further benefited by the removal of the one
said individual from Dunrobin to a road-side, where he might be
profitably employed in breaking stones--and that this new arrangement
could not be entered on too soon--the noble Duke would not be a whit
more astonished, or rendered a whit more indignant, by the scheme,
than were the Highlanders of Sutherland by the scheme of his
predecessor.

The reader must keep in view, therefore, that if atrocities
unexampled in Britain for at least a century were perpetrated in the
_clearing_ of Sutherland, there was a species of at least passive
resistance on the part of the people (for active resistance there
was none), which in some degree provoked them. Had the Highlanders,
on receiving orders, marched down to the sea-coast, and become
fishermen, with the readiness with which a regiment deploys on review
day, the atrocities would, we doubt not, have been much fewer. But
though the orders were very distinct, the Highlanders were very
unwilling to obey; and the severities formed merely a part of the
means through which the necessary obedience was ultimately secured.
We shall instance a single case, as illustrative of the process. In
the month of March 1814, a large proportion of the Highlanders of
Farr and Kildonan, two parishes in Sutherland, were summoned to quit
their farms in the following May. In a few days after, the surrounding
heaths on which they pastured their cattle, and from which at that
season the sole supply of herbage is derived (for in those northern
districts the gras