crops had
been tolerable; and though their stores of meal and potatoes were all
exhausted at the time of our coming among them (the month of June),
and though no part of the growing crop was yet fit for use, the white
fishing was abundant, and a training of hardship had enabled them to
subsist on fish exclusively. Their corn shot in the genial sunshine,
and gave fair promise, and their potatoes had become far enough
advanced to supplement their all too meagre meals, when, after a
terrible thunder-storm, the fine weather broke up, and for thirteen
weeks together there scarce passed a day without its baffling winds
and its heavy chilling showers. The oats withered without ripening;
the hardy bear might be seen rustling on all the more exposed slopes,
light as the common rye-grass of our hay-fields, the stalks, in vast
proportion, shorn of the ears. It was only in a very few of the more
sheltered places that it yielded a scanty return of a dark-coloured
and shrivelled grain. And to impart a still deeper shade to the
prospects of the poor Highlanders, the herring fishery failed as
signally as in the previous years. There awaited them all too
obviously a whole half year of inevitable famine, unless Lowland
charity interfered in their behalf. And the recurrence of this state
of things no amount of providence or exertion on their own part, when
placed in such circumstances, can obviate or prevent. It was a
conviction of this character, based on experience, which led the
writer of these remarks to state, when giving evidence before the
present Poor-Law Commissioners for Scotland, that though opposed to
the principle of legal assessment generally, he could yet see no other
mode of reaching the destitution of the Highlands. Our humane Scottish
law compels the man who sends another man to prison to support him
there, just because it is held impossible that within the walls of a
prison a man can support himself. Should the principle alter, if,
instead of sending him to a prison, he banishes him to a bleak,
inhospitable coast, where, unless he receives occasional support from
others, he must inevitably perish?

The sufferings of the people of Sutherland during the first of these
years of destitution (1836), we find strikingly described by M'Leod:

'In this year,' says the author, 'the crops all over Britain were
deficient, having bad weather for growing and ripening, and still
worse for gathering in. But in the Highlands they were