140 THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES. 



Highlands, which would obliterate and destroy all traces of Celtic na- 

 tionality ; and, to accomplish this end, it delights in fostering a system 

 by which the Southern sheep farmer and the English sportsman mono- 

 polise the Highlands, and drive the native population out of the country, 

 caring not whither they go. 



While the paper in question has always proved itself the inveterate 

 and uncompromising enemy of the Highland Crofters, this anti-Celtic 

 feeling has, if possible, become more intensified in recent years. 



In 1878 the Scotsman sent to the Highlands and Islands a " Special 

 Commissioner " to describe the condition of the Crofters, whose main 

 purpose seems to have been, if we may judge by results, to misrepresent 

 and vilify them ; and he has taken little trouble before making his 

 ignorant aspersions, to ascertain the facts. It is capable of proof that 

 he described the whole of North and South Uist, Benbecula, and Barra 

 a district of country seventy to eighty miles long from north to south, 

 and containing a population of 12,503 souls without ever leaving the 

 neighbourhood of Lochmaddy. The same state of things can be proved 

 in the case of a wide district of the parish of Gairloch and other West 

 Coast estates. The public were led to believe all this time that the 

 " Special Commissioner" was giving the results of his personal experi- 

 ence, and of his own investigation into the circumstances and surround- 

 ings of the people ! Were the conductors of the paper cognisant of these 

 facts ? We know that letters pointing them out were refused insertion 

 by the Editor. 



In February last the Scotsman sent another " Special Commissioner " 

 to the W r est, to give its readers an impartial (!) account of the disturb- 

 ances in the Isle of Skye, especially in Glendale. Those who knew 

 anything about the subject at once saw, when this Commissioner's 

 letters appeared, that they were little else than a badly- arranged hash 

 made up from Sir John Macneill's Report, the New Statistical Account 

 for the parishes of Bracadale and Duirinish, and stale stories repeatedly 

 told by the factor to ourselves, among others, before the " Special Com- 

 missioner " of the Scotsman ever visited the Isle of Skye. But this was 

 not all ! While he was supposed by the misinformed portion of the 

 public to have derived his information from independent sources, he was 

 actually found to be the guest of the factor for Glendale, from whose 

 residence, at Edinbane, nearly thirty miles from Glendale the district 

 supposed to have been described his letters were dated. Here the 

 "Special Correspondent," sent by the Scotsman to Skye when the 

 "Jackal" paid her visit to Glendale, actually found the "Special 

 Commissioner" of his journal, presumably much to his disgust and 



