Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1888 — Landlords In Scotland. [ARTICLE]

Landlords In Scotland.

afi4, are the liotise of for almost C. Bui’the of these arc not so n uel as. and none have the pathos of, of their own and their father's wrongs and wretchedness which the people tell today.- The old stories of the battld ficUi, and of clan meeting elan in deadly-duel* * have given way to stories of the clearing of the land that the laird or the stranger might have his shooting and fishing as well as his crops. At first the -people could not understand it. The evicted went to the laird, as they would have gone of old, and asked for a new home. And wliat was his answer? “I am not the father of your family.” And then, when frightened women ran [and hid themselves at his coming, he broke the kettles they left by the well, or tore into shreds the clothes bleaching on the heather. And, as the people themselves have it, “in these and similar ways he succeeded too well in clearing the island of its once numerous inhabitants, scattering them over the face of the globe.” There must have been cruelty indeed before the Western-Islander, who once loved liis chief better than his own life, could tell such tales as these, even in „ his hunger and despair. I know it is pleasanter to read of bloodshed in the past than starvation in the present. A lately published book on Ireland has been welcomed by critics, and I suppose by readers, because in it is no mention of evictions and crowbar brigades and liorors of which pewspapers make good capital. I have never been to Ireland,. and it may be you can travel there and forget the people. Butin the Hebrides the human silence and the ruined homes and the almost unbroken moorland would let us, as foreigners, think of nothing else.