"Let us first state that the ancestors of the marchioness were the 'great men' of the most northern part of Scotland, of very near three-quarters of Sutherlandshire. This county is more extensive than many French departments or small German principalities. When the Countess of Sutherland inherited these estates, which she afterward brought to her husband, the Marquis of Stafford, afterward Duke of Sutherland, the population of them was already reduced to 15,000. The countess resolved upon a radical economical reform, and determined upon transforming the whole tract of country into sheep-walks. From 1814 to 1820, these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3000 families, were systematically expelled and exterminated. All their villages were demolished and burned down, and all their fields converted into pasturage. British soldiers were commanded for this execution, and came to blows with the natives. An old woman refusing to quit her hut, was burned in the flames of it. Thus the countess appropriated to herself _seven hundred and ninety-four thousand acres of land_, which from time immemorial had belonged to the clan. She allotted to the expelled natives about six thousand acres--two acres per family. These six thousand acres had been lying waste until then, and brought no revenue to the proprietors. The countess was generous enough to sell the acre at 2s. 6d. on an average, to the clan-men who for centuries past had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the unrightfully appropriated clan-land she divided into twenty-nine large sheep-farms, each of them inhabited by one single family, mostly English farm-labourers; and in 1821 the 15,000 Gaels had already been superseded by 131,000 sheep. "A portion of the aborigines had been thrown upon the sea-shore, and attempted to live by fishing. They became amphibious, and, as an English author says, lived half on land and half on water, and after all did not half live upon both." Throughout the North of Scotland the tenants of the small grazing farms into which the Highland counties had been divided, have been ousted for the purpose of creating sheep-walks, and to such an extent has this been carried, that where once, and at no distant period, were numerous black-cattle farms, not an inhabitant is now to be seen for many miles.[121] The work, too, is still going on. "The example of Sutherland," says Mr. Thornton,[122] "is imitated in the neighbouring counties." The misery of these poor people is thus described:--