Far different was that of the surrounding Highlands. Protestantism had been at an early period introduced into Ross and Sutherland by its Earls and by Lord Reay. The Earl of Sutherland had been the first to subscribe the National Covenant in Greyfriars; and, after the suppression of the first Jacobite rising, Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis, as commissioner of the confiscated estates, had set himself to the creation of parishes and presbyteries in remote districts, where the Church of Scotland before had been unknown. In the better class of houses the old Highland fireplace, like a millstone, still occupied its place in the centre, with no corresponding aperture in the roof for the smoke. In the Western districts the greatest distress prevailed, for the country was at the parting of the ways in a time of transition. About the beginning of the present century the results of the French Revolution began to make themselves felt. Through the long war the price of provisions rose to famine price, and the impecunious Highland laird, like his more degenerate successor that battens on the sporting proclivities of the Cockney or American millionaire, set himself to the problem of increasing his rent-roll, and the system of evictions and sheep-farming on a large scale commenced. The Sutherland clearances forced the ejected Highlanders to Canada and the United States, while the poorer classes drifted down from the interior to the already overpopulated shore-line, where they eked out, as crofters or as fishermen, a precarious existence without capital or the acquired experience of either occupation, and laid the seeds of the future crofter question. The manufacture of kelp, which for a time rendered profitable to many a Highland proprietor his barren acres on a rocky shore, was not destined to long survive the introduction of the principles of Free Trade. The potato blight succeeded finally in reducing the once fairly prosperous native of the interior to chronic poverty and distress.