Truly money is the root of all evil. When specie was scarce in the North, a guinea a thing seldom seen, the fatal treasure of Loch Arkaig produced, or evoked, the moral consequences of hatred, malice, treachery and slander. Twenty years later the lack of money hardened the hearts of Chiefs (which had not been so very soft before). Clansmen had to emigrate, and they were wisest who sailed first from a land of famine. Their descendants, or some of them, dwell happily in a realm of forests, hills, and streams, deer and salmon, still retaining Highland courtesy, Highland speech, Highland courage, and Highland hospitality. They seem to have chosen the better part, and to be more fortunate than their cousins in the new times, or their fathers in the old days that were not really golden. On the whole, a distressed Highlander need not, it seems, conceive that the old times were free from distress, or that Chiefs were really always humane. They acted in accordance with their immediate interests. They kept rents low when it paid to have a following, and they screwed rents up when money was more desirable than men. The two policies might be contemporary; this among Mackenzies, that among Macdonalds. Ensign Small reported[197] that, among the Macdonalds, ‘the gentry are fond of a rising, the commoners hate it.’ The author of MS. 104 represents the Macdonalds as ‘cursing their Prince and their Chiefs.’ The world, to its disadvantage, allows interest to override sentiment, which we only find here and there, as in the noble words of Lochiel. When he arrived with Prince Charles in France, in the autumn of 1746, he was, of course, very poor. The Prince, according to Young Glengarry, in a conversation with Bishop Forbes, was obliged to give Lochiel a full security for his estates before the Chief would raise his clan. Consequently Charles felt bound, said Glengarry, to secure a French regiment first of all for Lochiel. This, in Lochiel, would have been a singular piece of caution! But let us hear his own words, in a letter to King James.[198] ‘I told H.R.H. that Lord Ogilby or others might incline to make a figure in France, but my ambition was to serve the Crown, and serve my Country, or perish with itt. H.R.H. say’d he was doing all he could’ (to return with forces to Scotland), ‘but persisted in his resolution to procure me a Regiment. If it is obtained, I shall accept it out of respect to the Prince, but I hope Yr. M. will approve of the resolution I have taken _to share in the fate of the people I have undone_, and, if they must be sacrificed, to fall along with them. It is the only way I can free myself from the reproach of their blood, and shew the disinterested zeal with which I have lived, and shall dye, Your Majesty’s most humble, most Obedient, and most faithfull subject and servant, ‘DONALD CAMERON.[199]’