The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which
 was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The
 representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was
 only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen
 of England is the titular owner of all the national soil.
 When the English government succeeded in suppressing the
 intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant
 incursions into the Lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans
 by no means gave up their time-honored trade as robbers;
 they only changed its form. On their own authority they
 transformed their nominal right into a right of private
 property, and as this brought them into collision with their
 clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king
 of England might 682as well claim to
 drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman.
 [25] This
 revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of
 the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its
 first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart
 [26] and James
 Anderson. [27]
 In the 18th century the hunted-out Gaels were forbidden to
 emigrate from the country, with a view to driving them by
 force to Glasgow and other manufacturing towns. [28] As an example of
 the method [29]
 obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing” made by the
 Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well
 instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her
 government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole
 country, whose population had already been, by earlier
 processes of the like kind, reduced to 15,000,
 into a sheep-walk. From 1814 to 1820 these
 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were
 systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages
 were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into
 pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction, and came
 to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to
 death in the flames of the hut, which she refused to leave.
 Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that
 had from time immemorial 683belonged
 to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about
 6,000 acres on the sea-shore — 2 acres per family. The
 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in
 no income to their owners. The Duchess, in the nobility of
 her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an
 average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen, who for
 centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of
 the stolen clanland she divided into 29 great sheep farms,
 each inhabited by a single family, for the most part
 imported English farm-servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000
 Gaels were already replaced by 131,000 sheep. The remnant of
 the aborigines flung on the sea-shore tried to live by
 catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an
 English author says, half on land and half on water, and
 withal only half on both. [30]