Hugh Miller: Dukes and Hinds

Hugh Miller: Dukes and Hinds Donald Macleod Hugh Miller: Hugh Who? But in the 1840s few names were better known in Scotland; and few Scottish names were better known world-wide.

Miller owed his fame to his editorship of the Witness, a newspaper which rivalled, and sometimes outsold, the Scotsman. Established in 1840, the Witness was the voice of the Evangelical Party in the Church of Scotland, then locked in a bitter struggle over laypatronage. Evangelicals argued that the right to choose their own ministers was a sacred right of

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

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

Coverage ranged from Afghanistan to the Crimea, from church history to literary theory and from philosophy to the franchise. Religion was a prominent theme, but issues of science and religion ran it a close second.

Miller was a pioneering geologist, a world-ranking palaeontologist and a brilliant populariser of science.

In those days, religion was at little risk from geology,

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but geology was at considerable risk from religion, and Miller, more than anyone else in Britain, secured the space for it to do its own work, untrammelled by religious dogma.

Miller’s labours as editor were prodigious, producing, single-handed, and twice a week, an enormous broadsheet famed for its formidable editorials. He never saw himself as a Highlander. Though hailing from ‘the North Country’, he was not a Gaidheal. He was born on the wrong side of the Cromarty Firth (the south) for that, and his genes were AngloSaxon. But he had close blood-ties with the Highlands, he had plied his trade as a mason in some of its remotest corners and he had travelled extensively throughout the region on his geological excursions.

He knew its history intimately, and that history included the dark story of the Clearances. The outrages at Glencalvie, Rhum, Farr and Kildonan smouldered in his soul, regularly erupting in volcanic description and burning invective.

One such eruption was a series of seven articles entitled, ‘Sutherland As It 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 and 1820 15,000 people were forcibly ejected from their farms, Miller summarised the policy in the biting indictment: ‘the county was thus improved into a desert’. His actual descriptions are second-hand, based on the eye-witness accounts of Donald Macleod’s Gloomy Memories, but Miller knew that his reports would have a circulation far wider than Macleod’s. He noted acidly that ‘ever since the completion of the fatal experiment which ruined Sutherland, the noble family through which it was originated and carried on have betrayed the utmost jealousy of having its real results made public’. Little had been done to heal Sutherland’s woe. Much had been 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 over 40 who spoke English and Miller was convinced that the language itself provided a shield behind which evil

Peopled Anew?

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

The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world’s history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present day have not yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries, and among them the most barbarous tribes.

It was the laudable ambition of Humboldt – first entertained at a very early period of life – to penetrate into distant regions, unknown to the natives of Europe at the time, that he might acquaint himself, in the fields of research altogether fresh and new, with men and with nature in their most primitive conditions. In carrying out his design, he journeyed far into the woody wilderness that surrounds the Orinoco [a river in northern Venezuela] and found himself among tribes of wild Indians whose very names were unknown to the civilized world. And yet among even these forgotten races of the human family he found the tradition of the deluge still fresh and distinct; not confined to single tribes, but general among the scattered nations of that great region, and intertwined with curious additions, suggestive of the inventions of classic mythology in the Old World. ‘The belief in a great deluge,’ we find him saying, ‘is not confined to one nation singly – the Tamanaes: it makes part of a system of historical tradition, of which we find scattered notions among the Maypures of the great cataracts; among the Indians of the Rio Erevato, which runs into the Caura; and among almost all the tribes of the Upper Orinoco.

When the Tamanaes are asked how the human race survived this great deluge – ‘the age of water’ of the Mexicans – they say, a man and a woman saved themselves on a high mountain called Tamanaeu, situated on the banks of the Asiveru, and, casting behind them over their heads the fruits of the mauritia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in these fruits produce men and women, who re-peopled the earth.

Thus,’ adds the philosophic traveller, ‘we find in all simplicity, among nations now in a savage state, a tradition which the Greeks embellished with all the charms of imagination.’ The resemblance is certainly very striking. ‘Quit the temple,’ 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 repeopled – ‘vail your heads, unloose your girdles, and throw behind your backs the bones of your grandmother.’ Rightly interpreting what seemed darkest and most obscure in the reply, they took ‘stones of the earth,’ and casting them behind them, the stones flung by Deucalion became men, and those by Pyrrha became women, and thus the disfurnished world was peopled anew. ************************ A century has not yet gone by since all the organic remains on which the science of Palaeontology is now founded were regarded as the wrecks of a universal deluge, and held good in evidence that the waters had prevailed in every known country, and had risen over the highest hills.

Intelligent observers were not wanting at even an earlier time who maintained that a temporary flood could not have occasioned phenomena so extraordinary. Such was the view taken by several Italian naturalists of the seventeenth century, and in Britain by the distinguished mathematician Hooke, the contemporary, and in some matters rival, of Newton.

But the conclusions of these observers, now so generally adopted, were regarded both in Popish and Protestant countries as but little friendly to Revelation; and so strong was the opposite opinion, and so generally were petrifactions [ie. fossils] regarded as so

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flourished. At the very moment when the British public were outraged over the evils of American slavery they were oblivious to the tragedy being perpetrated in their own Highlands. Indeed, Harriett Beecher Stowe, who had moved the world to tears with her story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had risen in high dudgeon to the defence of the noble Duke of Sutherland. ‘The Gaelic language,’ wrote Miller, ‘removes a district more effectually from the influence of English opinion than an ocean of three thousand miles, and the British public know better what is doing in New York that what is doing in Lewis and Skye.’

It fell to the church, then, to the Free Church, to expose the evil. She would translate Sutherland’s wrongs into English and ‘give them currency in the general mart of opinion’.

She would be no silent spectator of conflagration.

She would tell the world the real state of the district.

But the Duke was well aware of the risk, and he had his own answer: refuse sites for churches. Miller became incandescent. This was no mere denominational issue. It struck at the very foundations of the British constitution. The Witness reduced the issue to its legal and constitutional elements. A Highland chieftain (which is what the Duke of Sutherland was) was no Anglo-Saxon feudal lord. It was the clan that owned the land, not the chief, and his claim to a feudal title was not nobility, but rapacity. Besides, the evictions were monstrous disloyalty. The clansmen had fought valiantly to defend their chief against other septs, and this was their reward: eviction! This was intolerable.

The King couldn’t evict Britons from his kingdom.

How could a Duke evict them from their land? And how could the refusing of church sites be reconciled with the vaunted toleration of British democracy?

British citizens enjoyed freedom of religion, but not in Sutherland. Or did that freedom mean only that religious freedom was enjoyed throughout Britain generally, but not anywhere in particular? When it came to particulars, your freedom was at the mercy of landlords able to decree that you could worship nowhere in their territory.

Yet Miller was also conscious of a delicious irony. All

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over the country, sheep-farms were failing and sheepfarmers being bankrupted. Why? Because Highlanders forced into emigration had set up their own farms, and Miller noted with glee that the sheepbreeders of New Zealand and the Cape were avenging the Rosses of Glencalvie. The lords of the soil had seemed to triumph over the children of the soil, but the exiled children were now producing far better and far cheaper wool than the tyrants who had evicted them.

It would be wrong to imagine, however, that Miller was interested only in the problems of the Highlands. He was as familiar with the landscape and history of the Lothians as he was with those of Sutherland, and he knew that poverty plumbed depths in the South far below those of the North. He knew, too, that land was at the heart of them. The agriculture of the South was 1,000 years in advance of the north, where men still ploughed with the cas-chrom, women still spun with the distaff and manure was carried in creels. The land of the south blossomed, tenderly and lovingly cared for, neat and tidy beyond the imagination of the Highlander and productive beyond his dreams.

But if the farmers and landlords of the South cared lovingly for the land they cared little for those who worked it.

Twelve miles from Edinburgh, families lived in squalor worse than anything to be found in the North. Miller captured the squalor in two grim articles, ‘The Bothy System’ and ‘The Cottages of our Hinds’ (reprinted in Essays Historical and Critical).

He described three cottages.

One was in the extreme North West: built from local materials to a

specification that had scarcely changed since Creation. It was a long, low building, the inner wall of stone protected by an outer wall of turf, and the crevices between the stones caulked with moss. A fire burned in the middle of the floor, and the smoke, vainly seeking an exit, hung thick, and flat as a ceiling, overhead. The furnishing was scanty: a few wooden seats, a rude bed-frame half-filled with heather and a large pot suspended over the fire from the roof.

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

many proofs of a universal deluge, that Voltaire felt himself constrained, first in his Dissertations drawn up for the Academy at Bologna, and next in his article on shells in the Philosophical Dictionary, to take up the question as charged with one of the evidences of that Revelation which it was the great design of his life to subvert. And with an unfairness too characteristic of his sparkling but unsolid writing, we find him arguing that all fossil shells were either those of fresh water lakes and rivers evaporated during dry seasons, or of land snails developed in unusual abundance during wet ones; or that they were shells which had been dropped from the hats of pilgrims on their way from the Holy Land to their homes; or that they were shells that had gone astray from cabinets and museums; or, finally, that they were not shells at all, but mere shell-like forms, produced by some occult process of nature in the bowels of the earth [this last was a genuine issue of great controversy in the 1600s and early 1700s]. In fine, in order to destroy the credibility of the Noachian deluge, the brilliant Frenchman exhausted every expedient in his attempts to neutralize that Palaeontologic evidence on which geologists now found some of their most legitimate conclusions. But he only succeeded, instead, in producing compositions of which every sentence contains either an absurdity or an untruth, and in raising a reaction against the special school of infidelity which he had founded, that at length bore it down. ************************ ‘Are we sure,’ he inquired, ‘that the soil of the earth cannot produce fossils?’ Agate in some specimens contains its apparent sprigs of moss, which, we know, never existed as the vegetable they resemble; and why should not the earth have, in like manner, produced its apparent shells? Or are not many of these shells mere lake or river petrifactions? – one never sees among them ‘true marine substances’!! ‘If there were any, why have we never seen bones of sea dogs, sharks, and whales?’!!! And thus he ran on, in the belief apparently that he had to deal with an ignorant priesthood, too little acquainted with the facts to make out a case against him in behalf 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 at the time quite made up his mind either for the French school or against it, who was no uninterested reader of Voltaire’s disquisitions on fossil shells. And this young man was destined to be in the coming age what the Frenchman had been in the closing one – the leading mind of Europe. He, too, had been looking at fossils; and having no case to make out either for or against Moses, or anyone else, he had received in a fair and candid spirit the evidence with which they were charged. And the gross dishonesty of Voltaire in the matter formed so decided a turning point with him, that from that time forward he employed his great influence in bearing down the French school of infidelity, as a school detestably false and hollow; – a warning, surely, to all, whether they stand up for Revelation or against it, of the danger of being, like the witty Frenchman, ‘wicked overmuch’. ‘To us youths,’ says Goethe, in his Autobiography, ‘with our German love of truth and nature, the factious dishonesty of Voltaire, and the perversion of so many worthy subjects, became more and more annoying, and we daily strengthened ourselves in our aversion from him.

He could never have done with degrading religion and the sacred books for the sake of injuring priestcraft, as he called it; and thus produced in me many an unpleasing sensation. But when I now learned, that to weaken the tradition of a Deluge, he had denied all petrified shells, and only admitted them as lusus naturae, he entirely lost my confidence; for my own eyes had on the Baschberg plainly enough shown me that I stood on the bottom of an old dried-up sea, among the exuviae of its ancient inhabitants. These mountains had certainly once been covered with waves – whether before or during the Deluge did not concern me: it was enough that the valley of the Rhine had been a monstrous lake – a bay extending beyond the reach of eyesight: out of this I was not to be talked. I thought much more of advancing in the knowledge of lands and mountains, let what would be the result.’

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room, where a man and his wife could sleep in decency.

The second cottage was in one of the richest districts in the Lowlands of Scotland, a mere three hours walk from the capital. The whole area had but one character: ‘comfort gilded by the beautiful’. But scarcely 100 yards away from the ornate groves of the laird’s villa, where the massive, finely-arched trees closed over his head like the roof of a cathedral, was the cottage of a hind, where Miller was to lodge: a cold, cheerless hovel. The tenant was an old labourer, discharged because he was too ill to work, and allowed to keep his cottage only on condition that the farmer would have no responsibility for its maintenance. His wife, scarcely 60, was an old woman, and a martyr to rheumatism. Her bed was by the door, protected from the draught by a mere apronbreadth of partition. With every shower the rain came though, staining the curtains around the bed with damp blotches. Their pride and joy, an antique chest of drawers, was falling apart, the veneers peeling off.

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

But this was a superior class of cottage. Miller knows of another, though he has not seen it, this time in the Borders. It is in Northumbria, on the land of one of the best and most enterprising farmers in all England.

Miller knows of it only from the pen of another observer, an English clergyman, but its details provide the climax to a dreadful rhetoric. The rafters are rotten. The thatch looks like accidental vegetation on a dung-hill. When it rains, the water forms puddles on the earth-floor; and that floor contains the aggregate filth of years. In fact, it contains all that’s ever fallen on it since the day it was first laid: ‘The refuse and dropping of meals, decayed animal and vegetable matter of all kinds, these all mix together and exude from it.’

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And there is but a single room, where a family of eight live in utter discomfort and in total despair of any improvement.

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

Every great landlord in England publicly deplored the morals of the hinds and every one acknowledged that their living conditions were less than satisfactory. They even held conferences about it. Miller knew of one such conference where baronets, lords and dukes had thoroughly ventilated the issue. It would be prohibitively expensive to improve these cottages: they were unanimous on that. It would be ruinous, especially if every cottage had to have two apartments. But there was another way. They could provide inducements: a discounted rent for those hinds who could find some ingenious way (at their own expense) of dividing these single apartments into two.

The whole situation was clearly the hinds’ fault. They simply had no initiative.

Land reform is too often seen as a merely Highland issue, as if crofters had a monopoly of rural poverty and as if only the North had suffered Clearances.

Miller knew the truth; and the truth was different. He knew the appalling conditions under which people lived on the farms and in the mines of the Lothians. He knew the horrors of its quarries and its bothys at first hand from his days as a mason. And he knew that in the wynds of Blackfriars, within sight of Holyrood Palace and on the edge of a Royal Park, children were reared in conditions unfit for animals.

The naked power of the sword secured Scotland’s acres for Scotland’s noble families, and these acres in turn secured for these families power over both church and state. Even today, we have scarcely begun to redress 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 other jailed for beggary.