Hugh Miller: Dukes and HindsDonald Macleod

Hugh Miller: Hugh Who? But in the 1840s few nameswere better known in Scotland; and few Scottishnames were better known world-wide.

Miller owed his fame to his editorship of the Witness, anewspaper which rivalled, and sometimes outsold, theScotsman. Established in 1840, the Witness was thevoice of the Evangelical Party in the Church ofScotland, then locked in a bitter struggle over lay-patronage. Evangelicals argued that the right tochoose their own ministers was a sacred right of

Christian congregations. Their rivals, the Moderates,were happy to let that right lie with patrons, usually thelocal lairds. Parliament, the Court of Session and theScottish press were all on the side of the lairds.

Until the arrival of Hugh Miller and the Witness. Hewas its first editor and quickly established himself asthe people’s champion. He was determined, however,that the Witness should not be just another religiousjournal, far less the organ of a mere party. It was to bea newspaper, giving due coverage to ecclesiasticalaffairs, but also carrying the full range of news,domestic and foreign; and he would be utterlyindependent, telling the truth, impugn it who list, andbrooking no interference from his clerical proprietors,even though each was a household name.

Coverage ranged from Afghanistan to the Crimea, fromchurch history to literary theory and from philosophy tothe franchise. Religion was a prominent theme, butissues of science and religion ran it a close second.Miller was a pioneering geologist, a world-rankingpalaeontologist and a brilliant populariser of science.In those days, religion was at little risk from geology,

but geology was at considerable risk from religion, andMiller, more than anyone else in Britain, secured thespace for it to do its own work, untrammelled byreligious dogma.

Miller’s labours as editor were prodigious, producing,single-handed, and twice a week, an enormousbroadsheet famed for its formidable editorials. Henever saw himself as a Highlander. Though hailingfrom ‘the North Country’, he was not a Gaidheal. Hewas born on the wrong side of the Cromarty Firth (the

south) for that, and hisgenes were Anglo-Saxon. But he hadclose blood-ties withthe Highlands, he hadplied his trade as amason in some of itsremotest corners andhe had travelledextensively throughoutthe region on hisgeological excursions.He knew its historyintimately, and thathistory included thedark story of theClearances. Theoutrages atGlencalvie, Rhum,Farr and Kildonansmouldered in hissoul, regularly eruptingin volcanic descriptionand burning invective.

One such eruptionwas a series of seven articles entitled, ‘Sutherland AsIt Was and Is; or, How a Country May Be Ruined’(reprinted in Leading Articles on Various Subjects,1870). Noting that in the nine years between 1811 and1820 15,000 people were forcibly ejected from theirfarms, Miller summarised the policy in the bitingindictment: ‘the county was thus improved into adesert’. His actual descriptions are second-hand,based on the eye-witness accounts of DonaldMacleod’s Gloomy Memories, but Miller knew that hisreports would have a circulation far wider thanMacleod’s. He noted acidly that ‘ever since thecompletion of the fatal experiment which ruinedSutherland, the noble family through which it wasoriginated and carried on have betrayed the utmostjealousy of having its real results made public’. Littlehad been done to heal Sutherland’s woe. Much hadbeen done to conceal it.

Part of the reason for this was the Gaelic language.On one of his visits he had found only one man over40 who spoke English and Miller was convinced thatthe language itself provided a shield behind which evil

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The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, inan early age of the world’s history, by a great deluge,appears to have so impressed the minds of the fewsurvivors, and seems to have been handed down totheir children, in consequence, with such terror-struckimpressiveness, that their remote descendants of thepresent day have not yet forgotten it. It appears inalmost every mythology, and lives in the most distantcountries, and among them the most barbarous tribes.It was the laudable ambition of Humboldt – firstentertained at a very early period of life – to penetrateinto distant regions, unknown to the natives of Europeat the time, that he might acquaint himself, in the fieldsof research altogether fresh and new, with men andwith nature in their most primitive conditions. Incarrying out his design, he journeyed far into thewoody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco [a riverin northernVenezuela] and foundhimself among tribesof wild Indians whosevery names wereunknown to thecivilized world. Andyet among even theseforgotten races of thehuman family hefound the tradition ofthe deluge still freshand distinct; notconfined to singletribes, but generalamong the scatterednations of that greatregion, andintertwined withcurious additions,suggestive of theinventions of classicmythology in the OldWorld. ‘The belief ina great deluge,’ wefind him saying, ‘is not confined to one nation singly –the Tamanaes: it makes part of a system of historicaltradition, of which we find scattered notions among theMaypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians ofthe Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; andamong almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco.When the Tamanaes are asked how the human racesurvived this great deluge – ‘the age of water’ of theMexicans – they say, a man and a woman savedthemselves on a high mountain called Tamanaeu,situated on the banks of the Asiveru, and, castingbehind them over their heads the fruits of the mauritiapalm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in these fruitsproduce men and women, who re-peopled the earth.

Thus,’ adds thephilosophictraveller, ‘we find inall simplicity, amongnations now in asavage state, atradition which theGreeks embellished with allthe charms of imagination.’ Theresemblance is certainly very striking. ‘Quit thetemple,’ said the Oracle to Deucalion and Pyrrha,when they had consulted it, after the great deluge,regarding the mode in which the earth was to be re-peopled – ‘vail your heads, unloose your girdles, andthrow behind your backs the bones of yourgrandmother.’ Rightly interpreting what seemeddarkest and most obscure in the reply, they took

‘stones of the earth,’and casting thembehind them, thestones flung byDeucalion becamemen, and those byPyrrha becamewomen, and thus thedisfurnished worldwas peopled anew.

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A century has not yetgone by since all theorganic remains onwhich the science ofPalaeontology is nowfounded wereregarded as thewrecks of a universaldeluge, and held goodin evidence that thewaters had prevailedin every known

country, and had risen over the highest hills.Intelligent observers were not wanting at even anearlier time who maintained that a temporary floodcould not have occasioned phenomena soextraordinary. Such was the view taken by severalItalian naturalists of the seventeenth century, and inBritain by the distinguished mathematician Hooke, thecontemporary, and in some matters rival, of Newton.But the conclusions of these observers, now sogenerally adopted, were regarded both in Popish andProtestant countries as but little friendly to Revelation;and so strong was the opposite opinion, and sogenerally were petrifactions [ie. fossils] regarded as so

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Peopled Anew?Extracts from The Testimony of the Rocks, by Hugh Miller, 1857

flourished. At the very moment when the British publicwere outraged over the evils of American slavery theywere oblivious to the tragedy being perpetrated in theirown Highlands. Indeed, Harriett Beecher Stowe, whohad moved the world to tears with her story of UncleTom’s Cabin, had risen in high dudgeon to the defenceof the noble Duke of Sutherland. ‘The Gaeliclanguage,’ wrote Miller, ‘removes a district moreeffectually from the influence of English opinion thanan ocean of three thousand miles, and the Britishpublic know better what is doing in New York that whatis doing in Lewis and Skye.’

It fell to thechurch, then,to the FreeChurch, toexpose theevil. ShewouldtranslateSutherland’swrongs intoEnglish and‘give themcurrency in thegeneral martof opinion’.She would beno silentspectator ofconflagration.She would tell the world the real state of the district.

But the Duke was well aware of the risk, and he hadhis own answer: refuse sites for churches. Millerbecame incandescent. This was no meredenominational issue. It struck at the veryfoundations of the British constitution. TheWitness reduced the issue to its legal andconstitutional elements. A Highlandchieftain (which is what the Duke ofSutherland was) was no Anglo-Saxonfeudal lord. It was the clan thatowned the land, not the chief, andhis claim to a feudal title was notnobility, but rapacity. Besides,the evictions were monstrousdisloyalty. The clansmen hadfought valiantly to defend their chiefagainst other septs, and this was theirreward: eviction! This was intolerable.The King couldn’t evict Britons from his kingdom.How could a Duke evict them from their land? Andhow could the refusing of church sites be reconciledwith the vaunted toleration of British democracy?British citizens enjoyed freedom of religion, but not inSutherland. Or did that freedom mean only thatreligious freedom was enjoyed throughout Britaingenerally, but not anywhere in particular? When itcame to particulars, your freedom was at the mercy oflandlords able to decree that you could worshipnowhere in their territory.

Yet Miller was also conscious of a delicious irony. All

over the country, sheep-farms were failing and sheep-farmers being bankrupted. Why? BecauseHighlanders forced into emigration had set up theirown farms, and Miller noted with glee that the sheep-breeders of New Zealand and the Cape were avengingthe Rosses of Glencalvie. The lords of the soil hadseemed to triumph over the children of the soil, but theexiled children were now producing far better and farcheaper wool than the tyrants who had evicted them.

It would be wrong to imagine, however, that Miller wasinterested only in the problems of the Highlands. Hewas as familiar with the landscape and history of the

Lothians as he was with those ofSutherland, and he knew that povertyplumbed depths in the South far belowthose of the North. He knew, too, thatland was at the heart of them. Theagriculture of the South was 1,000 yearsin advance of the north, where men stillploughed with the cas-chrom, women stillspun with the distaff and manure wascarried in creels. The land of the southblossomed, tenderly and lovingly caredfor, neat and tidy beyond the imaginationof the Highlander and productive beyondhis dreams.

But if the farmers and landlords of theSouth cared lovingly for the land theycared little for those who worked it.Twelve miles from Edinburgh, families

lived in squalor worse than anything to befound in the North. Miller captured the

squalor in two grim articles, ‘TheBothy System’ and ‘The

Cottages of our Hinds’(reprinted in Essays

Historical and Critical).

He describedthree cottages.

One was in theextreme

North West:built fromlocalmaterialsto a

specificationthat had scarcely

changed since Creation. It was a long, low building,the inner wall of stone protected by an outer wall ofturf, and the crevices between the stones caulked withmoss. A fire burned in the middle of the floor, and thesmoke, vainly seeking an exit, hung thick, and flat as aceiling, overhead. The furnishing was scanty: a fewwooden seats, a rude bed-frame half-filled withheather and a large pot suspended over the fire fromthe roof.

But it had something unknown in the cottages of thefarm-labourers of the South: the luxury of an inner

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many proofs of a universal deluge, that Voltaire felthimself constrained, first in his Dissertations drawn upfor the Academy at Bologna, and next in his article onshells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up thequestion as charged with one of the evidences of thatRevelation which it was the great design of his life tosubvert. And with an unfairness too characteristic ofhis sparkling but unsolid writing, we find him arguingthat all fossil shells were either those of fresh waterlakes and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or ofland snailsdeveloped inunusualabundanceduring wet ones;or that they wereshells which hadbeen droppedfrom the hats ofpilgrims on theirway from theHoly Land totheir homes; orthat they wereshells that hadgone astray from cabinets and museums;or, finally, that they were not shells at all,but mere shell-like forms, produced bysome occult process of nature in thebowels of the earth [this last was agenuine issue of great controversy in the1600s and early 1700s]. In fine, in orderto destroy the credibility of the Noachiandeluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhaustedevery expedient in his attempts toneutralize that Palaeontologic evidenceon which geologists now found some oftheir most legitimate conclusions. But he onlysucceeded, instead, in producing compositions ofwhich every sentence contains either an absurdity oran untruth, and in raising a reaction against the specialschool of infidelity which he had founded, that at lengthbore it down.

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‘Are we sure,’ he inquired, ‘that the soil of the earthcannot produce fossils?’ Agate in some specimenscontains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know,never existed as the vegetable they resemble; andwhy should not the earth have, in like manner,produced its apparent shells? Or are not many ofthese shells mere lake or river petrifactions? – onenever sees among them ‘true marine substances’!! ‘Ifthere were any, why have we never seen bones of seadogs, sharks, andwhales?’!!! And thushe ran on, in the beliefapparently that he hadto deal with an ignorantpriesthood, too littleacquainted with thefacts to make out acase against him inbehalf of the Mosaic

narrative, and whom at least, should argument fail him,he could vanquish with a joke.

There was, however, a young German, who had not atthe time quite made up his mind either for the Frenchschool or against it, who was no uninterested reader ofVoltaire’s disquisitions on fossil shells. And this youngman was destined to be in the coming age what theFrenchman had been in the closing one – the leadingmind of Europe. He, too, had been looking at fossils;

and having no case to make out either for oragainst Moses, or anyone else, he hadreceived in a fair and candid spirit theevidence with which they were charged. Andthe gross dishonesty of Voltaire in the matterformed so decided a turning point with him,that from that time forward he employed hisgreat influence in bearing down the Frenchschool of infidelity, as a school detestablyfalse and hollow; – a warning, surely, to all,whether they stand up for Revelation oragainst it, of the danger of being, like the wittyFrenchman, ‘wicked overmuch’. ‘To usyouths,’ says Goethe, in his Autobiography,

‘with our Germanlove of truth andnature, the factiousdishonesty ofVoltaire, and theperversion of somany worthysubjects, becamemore and moreannoying, and wedaily strengthenedourselves in ouraversion from him.

He could never have done with degrading religion andthe sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, ashe called it; and thus produced in me many anunpleasing sensation. But when I now learned, that toweaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied allpetrified shells, and only admitted them as lususnaturae, he entirely lost my confidence; for my owneyes had on the Baschbergplainly enough shown me that Istood on the bottom of an olddried-up sea, among theexuviae of its ancientinhabitants. These mountainshad certainly once beencovered with waves – whetherbefore or during the Deluge didnot concern me: it was enoughthat the valley of the Rhine hadbeen a monstrous lake – a bayextending beyond the reach ofeyesight: out of this I was not tobe talked. I thought much moreof advancing in the knowledgeof lands and mountains, letwhat would be the result.’

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room, where a man and his wife could sleep indecency.

The second cottage was in one of the richest districtsin the Lowlands of Scotland, a mere three hours walkfrom the capital. The whole area had but onecharacter: ‘comfort gilded by the beautiful’. Butscarcely 100 yards away from the ornate groves of thelaird’s villa, where the massive, finely-arched treesclosed over his head like the roof of a cathedral, wasthe cottage of a hind, where Miller was to lodge: acold, cheerless hovel. The tenant was an old labourer,discharged because he was too ill to work, andallowed to keep his cottage only on condition that thefarmer would have no responsibility for itsmaintenance. His wife, scarcely 60, was an oldwoman, and a martyr to rheumatism. Her bed was bythe door, protected from the draught by a mere apron-breadth of partition. With every shower the rain camethough, staining the curtains around the bed withdamp blotches. Their pride and joy, an antique chestof drawers, was falling apart, the veneers peeling off.

And there was only one room, for the husband, hiswife and the lodgers: ‘this was all that civilisation, inthe midst of a well-nigh perfect agriculture, and amidthe exercise of every useful and elegant art, had donefor the dwelling of the poor hind.’

But this was a superior class of cottage. Miller knowsof another, though he has not seen it, this time in theBorders. It is in Northumbria, on the land of one of thebest and most enterprising farmers in all England.Miller knows of it only from the pen of anotherobserver, an English clergyman, but its details providethe climax to a dreadful rhetoric. The rafters arerotten. The thatch looks like accidental vegetation ona dung-hill. When it rains, the water forms puddles onthe earth-floor; and that floor contains the aggregatefilth of years. In fact, it contains all that’s ever fallen onit since the day it was first laid: ‘The refuse anddropping of meals, decayed animal and vegetablematter of all kinds, these all mix together and exudefrom it.’

And there is but a single room, where a family of eightlive in utter discomfort and in total despair of anyimprovement.

But this is not all. Every hind is also obliged to hire afemale labourer to do the field-work. She must livewith him, sharing this one apartment with a man, hiswife, his two sons and his four daughters.

Every great landlord in England publicly deplored themorals of the hinds and every one acknowledged thattheir living conditions were less than satisfactory. Theyeven held conferences about it. Miller knew of onesuch conference where baronets, lords and dukes hadthoroughly ventilated the issue. It would beprohibitively expensive to improve these cottages: theywere unanimous on that. It would be ruinous,especially if every cottage had to have twoapartments. But there was another way. They couldprovide inducements: a discounted rent for those hindswho could find some ingenious way (at their ownexpense) of dividing these single apartments into two.The whole situation was clearly the hinds’ fault. Theysimply had no initiative.

Land reform is too often seen as a merely Highlandissue, as if crofters had a monopoly of rural povertyand as if only the North had suffered Clearances.Miller knew the truth; and the truth was different. Heknew the appalling conditions under which people livedon the farms and in the mines of the Lothians. Heknew the horrors of its quarries and its bothys at firsthand from his days as a mason. And he knew that inthe wynds of Blackfriars, within sight of HolyroodPalace and on the edge of a Royal Park, children werereared in conditions unfit for animals.

The naked power of the sword secured Scotland’sacres for Scotland’s noble families, and these acres inturn secured for these families power over both churchand state. Even today, we have scarcely begun toredress the balance. One man owns 250,000 acres;another sleeps in a shop doorway, in a cardboard box.The one is invited to Royal dinner-parties; the otherjailed for beggary.

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