| <Taits Edinburgh Magazine 1846 ~~ Burton>
| <pb n="775">
| <Celtic tenures and Highland Clearings.>
| The stability of property is, next to the safety of life, the most 
| important object of every government; and no country can be 
| called highly civilized where it is not firmly and distinctly secured, 
| and where it is liable to any derangements, at the will either of 
| multitudes or individuals. It is a part of a firm and well established 
| rule of property, that it should be able to stand criticism and 
| inquiry down to its very roots.  Wherever people evade inspection 
| and examination, whispering that it is dangerous, that it may be a 
| precedent for questioning the stability of property at large, that it 
| will give a feeling of insecurity, ~~ there we may expect to find 
| something wrong that should be altered to give symmetry and 
| strength to the whole. There indeed we may expect to find property 
| having a feeble and uncertain hold of the social system, which it is 
| likely some time or other to lose; and it will not be the inspection 
| of the whole edifice, and the repairing and readjusting of the part 
| that is wrong, ~~ it will not be this, we say, that is dangerous to the 
| stability of the whole framework of property, though some 
| interested persons may tell us so; but it is the overlooking the 
| disorganized part, and allowing it to remain unremedied, that 
| constitutes the danger. In this country there is a most unworthy 
| diffidence on the point. People are afraid to look into the 
| foundations of proprietary rights, lest they should find the whole 
| rotten, and upset the social fabric in their operations. Yet there can 
| be nothing in the shape of social institution more deeply and firmly 
| planted, and more consistent with the sound philosophy of 
| individual rights, than the tenure of property in general in this 
| country ~~ nothing that has stronger support in the general 
| principles and opinions of the people ~~ nothing that has fewer 
| opponents. Surely this, instead of making us diffident of such 
| inquiries, should induce us to approach them with boldness and 
| freedom, and to ask whether the broad and just principles that 
| characterize the system in general may not have been overlooked 
| in some of its details. 
| We shall ever find, in countries even less civilized than our 
| own, and where the bonds of social rights and duties are less firmly 
| knit together, that the
| <pb n="776">
| charges against the people at large of having designs against the 
| rights of property, are false, and are raised by those whose 
| proprietary rights are questionable, to save them from inquiry. The 
| old scandal attached to the Roman agrarian law has now been long 
| confuted. After it had served its turn, in vilifying the people as a 
| body and all popular movements; after it had been the chosen 
| weapon of destruction to be cast in the face of all democratic 
| projects, and was held to embody in two words a practical 
| argument, sufficient to frighten the boldest advocates of 
| representative reform, it was at last discovered, that it did truly 
| refer to dishonesty and pillage, but not on the part of the people. 
| Indeed, if we reflect calmly on the matter, it will at once appear 
| that a deliberate purpose to appropriate the property of individuals 
| is not a mob vice. Violent, outrageous, and unreasonable, 
| assemblages of the people too often are. Too often have they 
| seized on the wealth, physical and moral, built up by ages of 
| enlightened laborious civilization, and, tearing it to pieces, 
| scattered it to the winds: too often have they wetted their hands in 
| blood, and that the blood of their best friends; but a design to 
| transfer houses, commodities, land and stock, from A or B to the 
| alphabet at large, does not enter the frenzied brains which do such 
| acts. Schemes of spoliation and appropriation are not naturally 
| gregarious, but are the creatures of long solitary nourishment in 
| individual bosoms. They have no heat in them to foster the 
| passions of the fierce democracy; they are not the electric fluid that 
| makes thousands of hearts beat at once with the same emotion. In 
| the fiercest outburst of popular rage, the promulgation of such a 
| doctrine of pillage, would throw dust upon the fire and put it out. 
| We admit freely that spoliation and the unjust transference of 
| property have frequently been caused by popular outbreaks, and 
| that the disturbance had been created or fed to promote views of 
| cupidity and aggrandizement: but these were the hidden plots of 
| cunning and powerful individuals, generally of the aristocratic 
| orders. The zealots of the Reformation, who tore down the nests 
| that the rooks might flee away, intoxicated as they were with 
| furious zeal, and full enough, no doubt, of evil passions, were pure 
| from the taint of selfish motives; though there were those standing 
| by, or occasionally cheering them on, who very quietly took 
| possession of the church lands, held them with a firm gripe, and 
| talked of their application to a ecclesiastical purposes as a <p> "devout 
| imagination." </p> At the end of a riot, pocket-books and watches have 
| changed pockets: but it was not among the motives of the mob to 
| bring about such a change. Enthusiasts sometimes faintly clamour 
| about a partition of property, or a spunge on the national debt; but 
| no considerable popular party ever advocated such doctrines, and 
| none we prophesy will ever do so. The second step in the 
| reasoning of those who in their dreams have taken the first makes 
| them immediately retrace it. They find that, with the stability of 
| property, the fruits of industrial wealth must disappear, and 
| industrial subsistence must be dried up and withered. 
| No! It is from the cupidity, the silent, watchful, aggrandizing 
| spirit of individuals taking advantage here and there of defects in 
| the law, that the rights of property are in danger; not from the 
| organized plans of any large portion of the public. Silently day by 
| day, and inch by inch, individuals are making their secret 
| encroachments; the progress is scarcely more perceptible than the 
| growing of the grain; but, when the proper time has elapsed, we 
| see the granary filled. The public is a bad conservator of its rights, 
| and too often is awakened to their existence when they are just 
| about to vanish for ever. A public writer cannot do better service 
| than in commenting on the reference of the proper principles of 
| exclusive ownership to the rights of masses of the community; and 
| we propose devoting these few pages to some remarks on the 
| relation of the proprietors of land in our mountain districts, to their 
| tenantry, and to the public at large. 
| If a victorious state were anxious to preserve the rights of 
| property in a conquered province, they would not do so by 
| immediately abolishing the old laws and customs regulating tenure 
| and succession, and substituting those of the victor. The Romans 
| did thus, it is true; but the Romans held that the lives and the 
| property of all conquered people were forfeited, and that whatever 
| was spared for them of either, was a free gift. The justice and 
| humanity of modern times lead us to a different conclusion, and we 
| admit to the conquered Sikh or Hindu the exercise of some 
| proprietary rights. It may happen that the conqueror's laws of 
| property are far more scientifically and philosophically digested 
| than those of the conquered; it will almost invariably happen that 
| they are more suitable to the people by and for whom they have 
| been made; but it will also very often happen, that rude as they 
| may be, the institutions of the conquered are better suited to their 
| own state of society than those of their victors would be. It is 
| generally difficult to persuade the victor that his institutions are not 
| better than those of the vanquished: yet the uncertainty, anarchy, 
| and misery, that follow the sudden substitution of new laws in 
| place of old established customs, have made modern colonists and 
| conquerors either spare the old institutions of the vanquished, or 
| substitute their own by very slow degrees. It is difficult, indeed, to 
| get individuals to comprehend and carry out this general policy. 
| The English official, especially if he be a lawyer, cannot well 
| conceive that there is any part of the world where the forms in 
| which he has been trained, and which he reveres, are not, or should 
| not be as powerful as in Middlesex. A pugnacious raja is indicted 
| as if he were a poacher. A New Zealand chief is served with a 
| <hi rend="italic"> <foreign lang="latin"> </foreign> 
| </hi> or subjected to a <hi rend="italic"> <foreign lang="latin"> 
| </foreign> </hi> and must stand the 
| consequences if he do not treat it as respectfully as if he were a 
| draper in Cheapside. The absence of English law is held to be 
| equivalent to no law. We remember well the air of blank 
| amazement with which a young articled clerk looked round him in 
| the Parliament House of Edinburgh, when he was told that there 
| was neither a King's Bench nor Common Pleas there; no Chancery
| <pb n="777">
| ~~ not even a Master of the Hoils ~~ but only a first and Second 
| Division, an Outer and Inner Hours, a Lord President and a Justice 
| clerk; and oddest of all oddities, a Lord Ordinary on the Bills! 
| Then, worse and worse, there was no nisi prius, no oyer and 
| terminer, no certiorari or writ of error, no traversing, no 
| empariance; nothing but advocations, suspensions, reclaiming 
| notes, interdicts, summonses, and condescendences. What a chaos! 
| Greater people are too much like our friend the articled clerk. 
| Their ears are deaf as stone to the justice or propriety of any other 
| code, any other system of rights between man and man, than that to 
| which they have been bred, being tolerated, in peculiar 
| circumstances, as better adapted to peculiar classes of society. We 
| have observed, that the just and now avowed policy towards any 
| conquered people, is to continue to administer among them their 
| own laws, or, at least, to change the system gradually, in a manner 
| not likely to be offensive to the public, or to press heavily on 
| individuals. Much more, then, when there is an incorporation 
| together of provinces not conquered, but united by consent or 
| incidental circumstances, should this rule be pursued. Has it, then, 
| been pursued in dealing with all the provinces of the United 
| Kingdom? We shall see. 
| The Highlanders of Scotland are well known to be as distinct 
| a race from the Lowlanders, as the Japanese from the Dutch, or the 
| American Indians from the Portuguese. What is still certainly 
| remarkable, after all the changes which this country has undergone 
| ~~ after the spread of knowledge, the rapid progress of commerce, 
| and the abundant facilities of locomotion, ~~ the traveler who 
| crosses the Highland line finds himself as completely among a 
| different people, as he who passes from the Bernese to the Italian 
| side of the Alps. In some places the traveler can stand and behold, 
| on one side of him, activity, industry, and comfort; clean fields, a 
| well-clothed peasantry, and comfortable houses; while on the 
| other, even before there is any great change in the nature of the 
| scenery, the manifestations of human life show neglect and 
| poverty; and an oriental indolence seems to spread its sleepy wing 
| over a people whose thin muscular forms, swarthy complexions, 
| and free wild motions, bespeak an eastern origin, and make us feel 
| as if we had crossed seas and deserts, instead of an imaginary line, 
| to behold them. All this is, perhaps, pretty well known already; but 
| did it ever occur to <reg orig="any one"> anyone </reg> to 
| inquire whether this peculiar people 
| might not have social institutions and notions of property and 
| justice, as different from those of their Saxon neighbours as the 
| two people were unlike in structure, aspect, and manners, in 
| language and ideas, in opinions and superstitions? Might it not 
| have naturally been inferred, that the same rules for fixing the 
| relative position of landlord and tenant, which, growing up in 
| practice among the pastures and corn fields of the south-eastern 
| counties, became at lat the law throughout Lowland Scotland, 
| would scarcely be the same that bound together the Highland 
| warrior and his chief, when they regulated the possession of their 
| hunting-grounds, or divided the spoil seized in a creach? And so, 
| indeed, on inspection, it has been found to be. The connexion of 
| the Highland chief and his followers was utterly distinct from that 
| of the Lowland baron and his feudatories and tenants; and it has 
| been by repeated processes of thoughtless cruelty, ~~ causing 
| intense suffering and heartburning among those who have had to 
| yield to the strong hand, that, to some extent, the Lowland laws 
| were given effect to in the Highlands, when they were found to 
| minister to the cupidity of individuals. The main peculiarity of the 
| system of Highland tenure was, that the chief was not the 
| proprietor of the land, but the leader of the People. He might be 
| very arbitrary and very despotic to individuals, but he could not 
| treat the general body of his followers as a people who had no right 
| to the soil on which they lived, save through his consent. In these 
| circumstances, the law of succession was liable to those breaks and 
| exceptions to which monarchies are liable, but proprietary rights, 
| settled by law, are not. It was not held, down even to 
| comparatively recent times, to be a general rule that the eldest son 
| succeeded the father. The hereditary principle was tolerated, not 
| enforced; and, when the clan, for the sake of having an able leader, 
| deemed it expedient to do so, they altered the succession as 
| unhesitatingly as the crew of a pirate would displace an imbecile 
| commander. We shall give the system they pursued in the words of 
| a very profound, though not always readable antiquary, George 
| Chalmers, the author of <hi rend="italic"> Caledonia. </hi>
| <q> </q>
| When one remembers that the principal assertor of absolute 
| right of property in the Highlands was
| <pb n="778">
| an heiress, the following statement from the same source is very 
| significant
| <q> </q> Again, ~~ <q> </q> 
| Mr. Gregory, who was a lawyer, seems, in his History of the 
| Western Highlands, to have been somewhat surprised, if not 
| scandalized, by finding these principles practically followed out in 
| comparatively late ages. At the period of 1545, he tells us, <q>  
| </q> 
| Again, in 1567, ~~ <q> </q> 
| Nor was this, at the time when the system of Highland 
| clearings commenced, an ancient obsolete law, which only existed 
| in tradition. Many men were then alive who had seen it in full 
| operation. When the eleventh Lord Lovat died, he left a daughter 
| who was his heiress by the Lowland law, but who was so far from 
| being admitted to be so by the clan, that, though she was married 
| to the son of one of the judges of the Court of Session, as a person 
| who would be powerful in the enforcement of an obnoxious law, 
| the estates were really possessed, and the rents were levied, by the 
| celebrated Simon Lord Lovat, the chief of the clan according to the 
| clan's own views. That this was the state of Highland society and 
| Highland property down to the rebellion of 1745, we have many 
| testimonies. In "Letters from a gentleman in the North of Scotland 
| to his friend in London," written about the year 1730, the writer 
| says, <q> 
| <pb n="779">
| </q> Meaning, that though the Lowland law has declared the 
| chief's territory, viewing it as property, to be forfeited, the 
| Highlanders, adopting their own indigenous laws, did not admit 
| that there was any change. In many instances, indeed, after the 
| rebellion of 1745, the estates were worth nothing to those who held 
| them according to law. They could levy nothing in the shape of 
| rent; but the original owner, though a wandering exile, received his 
| customary tribute. It was not by the laws enacted in the parliament 
| of Edinburgh that he levied this tribute; it was by the sanction of 
| the local customs and institutions of the Celtic races; and his rights 
| were acknowledged by them, though the had of a foreigner had 
| driven him forth from his people. It was as natural that it should be 
| so, as that the notions of the obligations between man and man, 
| resting on the old customs of the New Zealanders, should not be 
| immediately obliterated because a British colony had quarreled 
| with the chief. 
| Now, in a state of society like this, where the rights of the 
| chief and of the follower had grown up together, and were part of 
| the same system, the one having no better right to his castle than 
| the other had to his hovel, was it reasonable, was it humane, was it 
| just, that the chief should suddenly make up his mind to clear his 
| territory of its inhabitants and convert masses of their small 
| holdings into large farms, as coolly as the proprietor of a row of 
| houses in Westminster might eject his tenants and convert the 
| building into warehouses? Without an inconsiderate application of 
| the laws made for a totally different people in a different state of 
| society and with different mutual rights and obligations ~~ without 
| the blind application of the laws and institutions of the strong and 
| civilized part of the island, to the illiterate and helpless children of 
| mountain, could such a thing have been done? And what was the 
| result but such as might have been expected? Resistance ~~ 
| hopeless and feeble in effect, but strongly justified by internal 
| feelings of right and injured justice ~~ loud execrations, the wail of 
| the feeble yielding to the relentless despotism of the strong; and 
| the law, clear in the execution of its duty, sweeping away 
| resistance, discontents, and tears, and clearing off the whole heap 
| of misery from the presence of those who caused it. 
| The answer to this will be the answer given at the time. The 
| law was on the side of the proprietors. These chiefs were in 
| possession of many pieces of parchment locked up in charter 
| chests, the talismanic effect of which was to make them not chiefs 
| buy proprietors, holding the estate occupied by their vassals by as 
| clear and full a right of property as the Glasgow merchant who 
| purchases an estate up the Clyde, for which he has paid down 
| twenty-five years' purchase, can have. Of these charters the 
| clansmen knew and understood no more than the New-Zealanders 
| know of the correspondence of our colonial office ~~ they neither 
| saw them nor felt their influence; yet, by the law of the land, these 
| documents were to be held indicators of absolute property 
| whenever occasion should call them forth. The system of clanship 
| in the Highlands is often spoken of with extreme inaccuracy as if it 
| were identical with the feudal system. That system of Norman 
| growth prevailed in England, and penetrated through the Lowlands 
| of Scotland; but it never lived in the Highlands. The nature of a fief 
| was, that the holder who obtained it from the sovereign, had 
| thereby, as owner of the soil, authority over all those who resided 
| on it. The principle of clanship was, that because he was their 
| leader and judge, the chief had authority over the people of the 
| clan; and his rights, in connexion with the land, were a mere 
| accessory of his authority over the people who lived on it. Mr. 
| Skene, a cool and accurate antiquary, says with much justice: <q> 
| </q> It was the interest of these chiefs to encourage the 
| increase of population rather than the improvement of agriculture 
| in their territories. Every man who could wield a broadsword was 
| an addition to the power and influence of his chief; and as to the 
| subsistence of each additional man, were not the Lowlands all 
| before him, with freedom to choose his beef and mutton? <q> </q> 
| says Lord Selkirk, <q> </q> Does it not, independently 
| of stronger claims on the chief, seem somewhat unreasonable that, 
| when it suited his purpose, he might encourage the increase of the 
| people on his territory, and then, when views of a different kind 
| opened up to him, might sweep away the whole mass of population 
| which his ancestors had planted? But to be just to all, these 
| sweeping ejectments were the doing of strangers, not brought up 
| with Highland notions, and never in their careless selfishness 
| dreaming of <reg orig="any thing"> anything </reg> 
| but absolute property and their own 
| arbitrary use of it. The author we have just quoted, describes very 
| clearly and naturally the reluctance with which self-interest forced 
| its way between the Highland landowners and their humanity. <q>
| <pb n="280">
| </q>
| At length came the great Sutherland clearings, when people, 
| as many as might make the population of a secondary German 
| state ~~ people who believed that they had as good a right to their 
| cottages and paddocks as their chief had to his castle and forests 
| ~~ were driven from their homes by an armed force. It is a deep 
| scandal to our legal institutions that such a thing should have been. 
| So long as history is written minutely enough to chronicle such 
| transactions, this one will ever be marked as a barbarous 
| adaptation of the law of one people to do injustice to another. The 
| cry of tyranny raised by the ignorant sufferers has received an echo 
| in the far south; and one of the first historians and philosophers of 
| his day, has dedicated a great portion of a work likely to live for 
| ages, to an exposure of the injustice of the Sutherland clearings. M. 
| Simonde de Sismondi, in his "Etudes sur l'Economie Politique," 
| having entered, on politico-economical grounds, on the question of 
| the proper adjustment of the rights of customary holders and 
| tenants, has paid this country the compliment of devoting a whole 
| essay to our Highland clearings as a signal instance of outrage on 
| all the principles that ought to rule in the adjustment of such 
| mutual rights. It is shown that throughout all Europe there are 
| rights of occupancy founded on immemorial custom, like those of 
| the Highland tenants, but which, unlike the treatment which they 
| have received from the free government and the <p> "equal laws" </p>
| of this happy country, have been respected by the despotic 
| governments of Germany and Italy. Indeed, as it has been very 
| justly observed by <hi rend="italic"> The Westminster Review, 
| </hi> the rights of the Ross-shire tenants were of the same 
| character with those of the English copy-holders; but, alas! the 
| difference between the position of the poor Celt and that of the 
| English yeoman was great indeed! For the latter the laws were 
| created, ~~ they were framed out of the ancient customs on which 
| his tenure was founded. The Celt, overlooked as a member of the 
| body politic, too insignificant in his rights to be regarded since he 
| had ceased to be unpleasantly conspicuous as a fighter, had to 
| submit to the arbitrary operation of laws made for other races of 
| men and different social habits. 
| It has always been maintained by the defenders of these 
| clearings, that they were conducted with signal humanity. The 
| proprietor, being entitled to do what he liked with his own, said he 
| like to treat his own well, and wondered how his own were not 
| thankful for so much kindness. On this the adopted commodity 
| was so ungrateful as to repudiated the claim of ownership. The 
| vassals denied that their leader was absolute owner of their 
| holdings, and could not see <reg orig="any thing"> anything </reg> 
| to praise in those relaxations 
| which were to them, at best, only not carrying out injustice and 
| cruelty to the full extent to which the tyrant possessed the power of 
| persecuting them. And M. Sismondi shows that, had they been in 
| almost any other part of Europe, the law would have been in 
| favour of these poor people.
| There is a vindication of these Highland clearings which 
| demands our attention before we have done with them. It has been 
| said, that they are very profitable to the community, and that the 
| pecuniary advantage which the landlords have reaped has been 
| occasioned by a change, by which enlightened and industrious 
| capitalists have displaced hordes of semi-barbarians, serviceable 
| only for war and depredation ~~ a burden on a well-ordered 
| community. We admit that the sheep-farming system has been 
| advantageous to the community at large, as well as a great gain to 
| the highland landlords; and that Europe cannot produce a more 
| admirable illustration of the beneficial effect of an enlightened 
| system of agriculture than the farm-steadings of Sutherland afford, 
| when compared with such Highland huts as are to be seen in other 
| places, models no doubt of those which the Sutherland estates 
| would have exhibited if the clearings had not been made. A system 
| of husbandry which produces little, is the same kind of gain to the 
| community that a railway is when it displaces a line of rickety 
| coaches on a turnpike road. The simile has a farther and deeper 
| application. When the directors of a railway make up their minds 
| that their line shall pass through certain proprietors' grounds, the 
| law does not allow them to go to a proprietor and tell him that as 
| their project is very much for the benefit of the community, they 
| intend to cut away a portion of his lands for the use of the railway, 
| without giving him any compensation. On the same principle,
| <pb n="781">
| the Highland proprietors ought not to have been allowed to clear 
| their estates without giving compensation to those whose interest 
| in the land was by the custom of the country as well established as 
| their own. In what manner it may be just to deal with rights which 
| probably are of a somewhat similar character in Ireland, we cannot 
| pretend to say. We have not sufficiently studied that great subject. 
| On the Highland tenures, however, we are bound to say, that 
| though we think a system of adjustment of rights ought to have 
| been adopted before the clearings commenced, we think it would 
| now be too late. <hi rend="italic"> <foreign lang="latin"> 
| </foreign> </hi> those who had the 
| principal interest at stake have suffered the injustice, and are under 
| the sod, or are passing the latter years of their age, whether in 
| prosperity or adversity, in distant lands. A race has grown up who 
| are to a certain extent aware of the precarious character of their 
| tenures, though they may not be brought up with the best notions 
| of the means of making a livelihood in places distant from their 
| original homes. We fear that the only remedy for the remaining 
| evil ~~ the inflammation remaining after the amputation ~~ is a 
| stringent application of the poor law; compelling Highland 
| proprietors to provide for the surplus population reared by them, 
| when they endeavour to get large rents by increasing the number of 
| small holdings, and for the people who are rendered homeless by 
| their clearings. We fear that  that blundering and purposely 
| incomplete measure, the Scottish Poor Law Act, ahs not strength 
| for carrying out this principle 
| It has been well observed by <hi rend="italic"> The 
| Westminster Review, </hi> that the powers which have been 
| exercised in the Highland clearings are powers which a despotic 
| monarch is never known to possess. This is one of the evils arising 
| out of the indiscriminate application of the laws of property. When  
| the laws made for a populous and highly-cultivated district, where 
| land and its occupancy are matters of regular traffic, are transferred 
| and made applicable to wide, thinly-peopled tracts, occupied by 
| poor, half-civilized people; instead of conveying to them the 
| benefits of equal laws and protection to their rights, these laws 
| inflict upon them the scourge of an arbitrary government, fortified 
| in its operations by all the array of power that has been established 
| for the purpose of enforcing, in the place from which the system 
| has been taken, just proprietary rights. We shall give some 
| illustrations of this. 
| A monarch, however despotic, must still be, to a certain 
| extent, the representative of the will of his people. It is as the 
| embodiment of the accumulated strength of the community that he 
| acts on individuals. He may be able to hang, imprison, or expel 
| from his territory, any small number of persons who have 
| displeased him: but he cannot put to death the whole or nine-tenths 
| of his people; nor can he expel them from the country, as the 
| Highland landlords did. Whatever acts he performs against one 
| portion of his people, must be through the instrumentality of the 
| other. And herein consists the difference between sovereignty and 
| proprietary right, that the latter is not left to the enforcement of 
| those that are subject to it, but, in such a country as ours, demands 
| the whole concentrated power of the incorporated states of which 
| the British Empire consists. A monarch cannot set his face against 
| the prevalent religion of his people. Indeed, he must generally be a 
| votary of it, and must confine his intolerance, if he be intolerant, to 
| some small minority, whom the majority helps him to persecute. 
| What monarch of a small kingdom was ever able to prohibit the 
| whole of his people from having a place of worship within his 
| territory? Yet this is what the great Highland proprietors are able to 
| do, through the misapplication, to their case, of that right of 
| property, which declares that a man is not bound to allow his land 
| to be used for purposes he dislikes. The rule is perhaps a sound one 
| in Middlesex and Midlothian. There, in the multiplication of 
| proprietary rights, the abundance of wealth, and the diversity of 
| religious opinions, it will be strange indeed if any sect cannot get 
| itself accommodated. It may be driven from one place, because the 
| neighbours do not like an organ; from another, because the plan of 
| the church is not in conformity with the architecture of 
| neighbouring houses; or from another, because the spot is part of a 
| pleasure ground: but somewhere or other, in return for their 
| money, the congregation will be allowed to worship God according 
| to their conscience; and the worst that befalls them is, that some 
| neighbour in his spite builds a wall as near as he can to the spot to 
| shut out the light, or the pious children of the neighbourhood, 
| hearing how the sect are spoken of by their parents, break the 
| windows. The owner of Highland estates, isssuing his mandates 
| from Piccadilly or Grosvenor Square, knows no more than he does 
| of the Caffres, finds that the Free Church is a church he does not 
| like, and refuses a site as unhesitatingly as if he had been asked to 
| give a piece of his pretty lawn at Kingston for a synagogue ~~ the 
| Jews being also a people whom he does not like. When proprietors 
| are compelled to give the lands which they cultivate, and the 
| pleasure grounds which are the object of their enjoyment, because 
| the public demands them for railways, it were surely not a very 
| tyrannical law which should compel the proprietor to give up a few 
| roods of ground on some desolate wild which he does not cultivate, 
| and never sees, in order that a whole territory, as large as those 
| German states from which we take our royal consorts, may not be 
| able to lift their voice and say that they are denied the use of the 
| barren surface of the earth for the celebration of the rites of that 
| religion to which they all belong. 
| The rules of absolute proprietorship, now so much indulged 
| in, being quite inimical to the old territorial notions in the 
| Highlands, their full effect has only developed itself gradually. The 
| idea, for instance, of treating his waste districts of country as an 
| English proprietor would his lawn and gravel walks, and 
| attempting to preclude access to them, never would have occurred 
| to a Highland chief in his most despotic moments. An English 
| duke, however, having become the
| <pb n="782">
| tenant of the wild mountain district at the head of the Dee, 
| deeming that he can conduct his field sports with more success and 
| more satisfaction to himself if the wild waste which calls him 
| occupant be surrounded by a legal cordon excluding it from 
| intrusive footsteps as securely as if it were a walled garden, has 
| made a new law for himself, and instructed his keepers to stop 
| people who are found crossing this wilderness. The glen 
| principally watched is the glen Lui Beg, the natural passage 
| towards Ben Muich Dhui, the centre of the Cairngorm range, the 
| highest mountain in Britain, and for abundance of summer snow, 
| precipices, and cataracts, the most worthy of a visit. As the 
| interruption of the passenger over uncultivated and unfenced wilds, 
| is a new thing in Scotland, it has not yet received the sanction of 
| any law, and till it has done so, must be held illegal. If any bill, 
| perhaps in the form of an act, <p> "to interpret" </p> some game act, 
| should be brought in to extend the law of trespass to such new exigencies, 
| we hope the public will be on their guard to defeat it. 
| A neighbouring Scottish proprietor, the Duke of Athole, 
| following so comfortable an example, has lately attempted to 
| prohibit, in the same manner, the passage through Glen Tilt, the 
| ancient thoroughfare between the basin of the Tay and that of the 
| Dee. The English duke's hint must be very valuable to the Athole 
| family, who previously had followed the understood rule in 
| Scotland, that to keep a place sacred from intrusion, it must, if not 
| cultivated, be at least fenced in. The visiter of the falls of the Bruar 
| is preceded by the keeper thereof with a key, who having first 
| received the proper fee, or satisfied himself that the visiter is good 
| for the amount, opens and admits. We quarrel not with his grace 
| for the price he charges for a walk in his pleasure grounds, or for 
| the vigilance with which his agrarian police take care that those 
| how attend the church within the old cathedral on Sundays, shall 
| not filch a gratuitous glance of the exhibition. His grace has as 
| good a right to be a showman as the lessee of Vauxhall; but, giving 
| him full license to do what he likes with his own, it does not follow 
| that he is to do what he likes with that which belongs to the public; 
| and the right of passage through Glen Tilt belongs to the public, if 
| the free use for centuries, of the only road which leads from one 
| district to another without going thirty miles round, can be secured 
| to the public in Scotland by being used for centuries.
| We do not believe that the Highland landlords in general will 
| be inclined to adopt measures so utterly irreconcilable with the old 
| habits of the people; but there is much fear that English gold may 
| buy up this tempting privilege of exclusion, if it can be legally 
| exercised, and that the proprietors may say, <p> "Thou canst not say I 
| did it." </p> Some remarks on the closing of Glen Lui Beg having 
| appeared in <hi rend="italic"> The Examiner, </hi> were 
| answered by the Don Quixote of the game laws, Mr. Grantley 
| Berkeley. He, being an honest enthusiast, disdains to adopt any 
| sophism, but exhibits the project in its most offensive shape. He 
| says, <q> </q> the philosophy of this is, that the absolute solitude 
| of the district being necessary for the sport in which a rich man 
| delights, he must be entitled to it by paying for it. This sentiment 
| was echoed by a letter signed "Leather Stocking," in 
| <hi rend="italic"> The Aberdeen Herald, </hi> evidently written by no 
| mere impartial spectator. He tells us that <q> </q> We beg 
| attention to the wide terms of measurement applied here to the 
| tracts of country that on this system must be kept clear of even 
| <hi rend="italic"> one man. </hi> This writer gives a case of hardship, 
| which we shall do him the service of repeating. 
| <q> </q> <reg orig="i.e."> that is </reg> of 
| course, had he applied, to be refused. In one of Hood's tales 
| <reg orig="some one"> someone </reg> speaks of 
| <p> "a impudent fellow, a standing up for his rights." 
| </p> The person who exercised his right of walking along this public 
| thoroughfare contrary to the will of Lord Glenlyon, must have 
| been of the class so described. The writer we have just quoted tells 
| us that the Duke of Leeds pays 1400 pounds a-year for his glens. 
| This is the formidable feature of the affair. It shows what sums the 
| Highland lairds may obtain for their wastes, provided they can give 
| them the character of unapproachableness. A few rich English 
| lessees may, by judiciously blocking up the passes as the 
| Highlanders did of old, shut up the whole of our mountain  ranges 
| from intrusion. It is true they must have a new law to put this new 
| restriction on the liberty of the people. But such restrictions have 
| occasionally been created when they were required to serve very 
| worthy and beneficial purposes. The law of copyright is a 
| restriction for the benefit of literature; the law of patents is a 
| restriction for the encouragement of invention. It remains to be 
| seen whether deer-stalking be considered a pursuit so ennobling, 
| and so valuable to the community, that a new restriction on 
| personal freedom, not needed by graziers and others who rear the 
| ordinary food of man, shall be made for its special encouragement 
| and protection.