surveillance. If the misrepresentations of the press could have
altered the matter of fact, famine would not have been gnawing the
vitals of Sutherland in every year just a little less abundant than
its fellows, nor would the dejected and oppressed people be
feeding their discontent, amid present misery, with the recollections
of a happier past. If a singularly well-conditioned and wholesome
district of country has been converted into one wide ulcer of
wretchedness and wo, it must be confessed that the sore has been
carefully bandaged up from the public eye; that if there has been
little done for its cure, there has at least been much done for its
concealment. Now, be it remembered that the Free Church threatens to
insert a _tent_ into this wound, and so keep it open. It has been
said that the Gaelic language removes a district more effectually
from the influence of English opinion than an ocean of three
thousand miles, and that the British public know better what is
doing in New York than what is doing in Lewis and Skye. And hence one
cause, at least, of the thick obscurity that has so long enveloped the
miseries which the poor Highlander has had to endure, and the
oppressions to which he has been subjected. The Free Church
threatens to _translate_ her wrongs into English, and to give them
currency in the general mart of opinion. She might possibly enough
be no silent spectator of conflagrations such as those which
characterized the first general improvement of Sutherland, nor yet
of such Egyptian schemes of house-building as that which formed part
of the improvements of a later plan. She might be somewhat apt to
betray the real state of the district, and thus render laborious
misrepresentation of little avail. She might effect a diversion in
the cause of the people, and shake the foundations of the hitherto
despotic power which has so long weighed them down. She might do
for Sutherland what Cobbett promised to do for it, but what Cobbett
had not character enough to accomplish, and what he did not live
even to attempt. A combination of circumstances have conspired to
vest in a Scottish proprietor, in this northern district, a more
despotic power than even the most absolute monarchs of the Continent
possess; and it is, perhaps, no great wonder that that proprietor
should be jealous of the introduction of an element which threatens,
it may seem, materially to lessen it. And so he struggles hard to
exclude the Free Chur