Clearances and Evictions.

In May, 1845, eighteen families in Glen Calvie gave bond peaceably to leave on the '24th; after which their stock was to be given them, and they might go where they wished. These eighteen families, consisting of ninety-two individuals, supported themselves in comparative comfort, without a pauper among them; they owed no rent, and were ready to pay as much as any one would give for the land, which they and their forefathers had occupied for centuries, but which it seems is now to be turned into a sheep walk.

Behind the church, ill the churchyard, a long kind of booth was erected; the roof formed of tarpauling stretched over poles, the sides closed in with horse-cloths, rugs, blankets, and plaids.

A fire was kindled in the churchyard, round which the poor children clustered. Two cradles, with infants in them, were placed close to the fire, and sheltered round by the dejected-looking mothers. Contrasted with the gloomy dejection of the grown-up and the aged, was the melancholy picture of the poor children playing thoughtlessly round the fire. Of the eighty people who passed the night in the churchyard with most insufficient shelter, twonty-three were children under ten years of age, nine persons were in bad health, ten above sixty years of age; twelve out of the eighteen families have been unable to find places of shelter. With the new Scotch Poor Law in prospect, cottages were everywhere refused to them. Each family had, on an average, about £18 to receive for their stock. This sum is sufficient evidence that they were supporting themselves respectably. It will, however, soon be spent, and in the search for places and employments in the south, it is a moral certainty that most of these unskilled men and their families will be reduced to pauperism. This is the benefit the country derives from such proprietors and factors as have owned and managed this glen.

The course pursued in Sutherlandshire, in turning the whole county into a sheep walk, is impolitic as regards the population, as evidenced by their condition; impolitic as regards the country, as evidenced by its stationary or rather retrograde appearance, and by the unimproved rent roll. What then is the condition of the people and of the county in Caithness, where a totally different system is pursued? The great bulk of the county is let in small farms from £15 to £50 a year rental. Instead of the wretched bothies crowded in clusters, and then some twenty miles without a cottage, which is the characteristic of Sutherlandshire, and scarcely a man to be seen employed; throughout Caithness there is scarcely a bothie to be seen, but every five or six hundred yards there is a good stone cottage, often with a little garden to it, and evidences of comfort about it. The whole land is cultivated, and there is scarcely a field without men and horses in it labouring, and women weeding and stone picking.

In the sheep-farming and clearance county of Sutherland, the annual rental assessed to the property-tax in 1815 was £33,878, in 1842-3 it was £35,567, being an increase of about 1/20 in twenty-seven years. The population in Sutherland in 1801 was 23,117; in 1841, 24,666, or an increase of about 1,500 in forty years. In Caithness, in 1815, the land rental was assessed to the property-tax at £35,469; in 1842-3, the land rent was assessed at £65,869, and the house rent at £10,500. The population in 1801 was one third less than that of Sutherland: in 1841, it was one third more.

I see, the Spectator writes, that the extensive sheep-farms and fishing villages support a larger population than was supported in a chronic state of pauperism raider the tenant and tacksman system.

It is scarcely possible, in three lines, to collect a greater numbor of fallacies, to make more assertions directly contrary to the truth. The “larger population,” where is it? I rode over an “extensive sheep-farm” yesterday. It extends over twenty miles, is in the hands of one man, who employs twenty shepherds, one man to a mile. The “fishing villages;” I have been all round the coast of this country, and I have not seen one fishing village. I have seen sevend collections of wretched huts on he coast, the male population of which migrate to Lewis and Wick to the herring fisheries carried on there, leaving their femilies to subsist on the credit of what they may earn. But not a “fishing village,” where fishing is carried on as a regular trade and means of living, have I seen in one hundred miles of coast. In only two places have I seen a boat of any kind—the people are so wretchedly poor that they have no boats, much less a market or a trade to “support a larger population” than formerly, in “greater comfort,” by their fishing. And their former “chronic state of pauperism;” why, imagination cannot conceive their situation to be worse, a more universal state of “chronic pauperism” than that which now exists. Three fourths of the people, if not actually paupers on the roll, live by begging. They have nothing on earth to do, or that they can do. The bits of land they have will barely supply them with potatoes, and they have to migrate south as day labourers the greater part of the year, in order to pay their rent. It is impossible to conceive, generally, wretchedness more abject than this “greater comfort.”

The system of driving out the people has been here tried without compunction. The population has been destroyed, and there is a starving refuse left behind without any means of employment. The Peasantry have been thinned and thinned till they are almost isolated, and yet they starve. And who prospers by this system? Not the gentry apparently—the landowners—for they are most of them over head and ears in debt. It is, however, manifest that the people and the nation lose by it.

On the evidence before the Commissioners of Poor Law Inquiry, it was stated that W. Donald McDonald, with 30,000 acres, only kept eleven shepherds. The Rev. W. McKenzie, speaking of the clearance system, said, “I am very positive, and have not the least doubt, that the condition of the people has. been very much deteriorated by the change.”

The Rev. W. Findlater, of Duirness, said, that while the population of the parish continues much the same as formerly, the number of paupers on the roll is just about doubled. While the Population were settled in the interior, though they were more liable to be affected by unfavourable seasons, yet from the numbers of sheep and. cattle which they kept, they could generally, by the disposal of part of their stock, purchase the meal requisite for their families. And though they have now the additional resource of fishing, yet, from the nature of the coast and boisterous character of the Western Ocean, it is very precarious; they cannot purchase boats or drifts of lines for white fishing. The Rev. Daniel McKenzie, of Foir, said, “I remember very well the change which took place on removing the small tenants from the interior to the seashore. In my opinion, the people have been decidedly losers by the change. They cannot command the same amount of the comforts of life as they did formerly.”

See a long and very interesting series of letters on the condition of the poor in the highlands of Scotland in the Times, May and June, 1845. Also the debate as reported in the Times of July 4th, 1845.

On the third of April, 1846, Mr. O'Connell entered into an explanation of the causes of the disturbances and crimes of Ireland. He read a mass of evidence to prove that one of the main causes was the clearance system, and mentioned as an appalling fact, that within five years 120,000 persons had been evicted in the county of Tipperary alone. (Not contradicted.)