142 THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES. 



Waterstein, and again drove the proprietor's stock off the 

 hill " ; while the one from Inverness asserted that, " There is 

 no doubt of the fact that the Qrofters of Milovaig have 

 resented the action of the Court of Session, in the case of 

 John Macpherson and the others, by a demonstration of 

 defiance of the law. . . . The horns sounded in the 

 Glen early in the forenoon, the people assembled, men and 

 lads, proceeding to the grazings of Waterstein ; they drove 

 off the stock that belonged to the trustees, and replaced 

 them with stock that belongs to themselves." These 

 statements, so circumstantially paraded before the public, 

 turned out to be absolute falsehoods, without a vestige of 

 foundation. Yet the Scotsman gave them the greatest pro- 

 minence, and wrote another lying, sensational leading article, 

 based upon them, in which the crofters and their friends 

 were ponderously abused, as the very scum of creation. 

 Next morning his Dunvegan correspondent contradicted the 

 Portree telegram of the previous day, but the Scotsman 

 published this contradiction with an editorial qualification 

 which falsely suggested, though it did not actually say, 

 that the same correspondent was responsible alike for the 

 falsehood and its contradiction. 



The public sentiment regarding the trial and punishment 

 of the Glendale Crofters, and the position of the great 

 Whig Libeller in relation to the whole case of the High- 

 land people, were well stated in a leading article in the 

 Greenock Telegraph, immediately after the trial, thus : 



The result of the trial of the Glendale crofters has been in strict 

 accord with the expectations of all who have studied the long and 

 sorrowful story of which this is the latest chapter. The Judges are 

 obliged to act upon statutes framed by a class in their own interests ; 

 and in the present instance it was hardly possible for them to be more 

 lenient than they have been. ] t is beyond their Lordships' province 

 to rise to the region of equity ; and the administrators of the law in 



