THE AUTUMN CAMPAIGN. 105 



Lord Macdonald, that I shall be ready at any moment to implement Mr. 

 Mackenzie's offer. I am, &c., 



ALEXANDER MACKENZIE. 



Guernsey, 4th November, 1882. 



Alexander Mackenzie, Esq. , Dean of Guild, Inverness. 



Dear Sir, 1 am in receipt of your letter of the ist, enclosing the reply 

 of Lord Macdonald's solicitors to your telegram tendering them payment 

 of two years' rent due by the Braes crofters. 



From Lord Macdonald's dignified position, he might be thought 

 entitled to ask me for an introduction before accepting any assistance on 

 behalf of his tenants ; but acting as I was, on the spur of the moment, 

 to prevent bloodshed, and possibly to avert an act of civil war, I did not 

 think that in these hard-money days his solicitors would raise any objec- 

 tions on the ground of my being unknown to them, especially as I made 

 the Dean of Guild of Inverness the medium of my communication. 



As the days of chivalry are gone, and as clan ties and feelings of 

 patriotism and humanity are no longer of binding obligation, I could not 

 imagine that a firm of solicitors would stand on so much ceremony. 



Whatever misapprehension Lord Macdonald's advisers are labouring 

 under, I can assure them that I am labouring under none as to the real 

 issues between him and his crofters. It would, doubtless, suit them to 

 have the case tried on a false issue of trespass before a Court which must 

 be bound by former decisions and prevailing canons as to the rights of 

 Highland landlords. The plea of the poor people is that Lord 

 Macdonald is the trespasser, in depriving them of their mountain grazings, 

 without consent or compensation, and thereby reducing them to abject 

 poverty. What can they do ? It would raise the whole question of con- 

 stitutional right, and, as I have said, the Court is bound by former 

 decisions that the landlord has the right to resume possession, and to 

 evict and banish the peasantry after having first reduced them to the last 

 nettle of subsistence. A sentence of banishment used to be regarded as 

 a punishment only next to death, but in the phraseology of landlords it 

 is now an "improvement". 



In the days of " bloody " George of our own ilk, the Court of Session 

 knew better how to apply the "boot" and the thumb-screw than con- 

 stitutional law. Even later, such ruffians as old Braxfield recognised no 

 right in the people, and according to their dog Latin, they found that 

 the landlord was the only person who had a persena standi. It might, 

 indeed, be an interesting question for more enlightened and better men 



