Living With Classic Economic Policies

Barry, My Liege :

Here follows a somewhat personalized view of the effects of Classical Economic policies like those proposed by the Republican Party on real people including some of my ancestral family :

From THE HISTORY OF BRITISH CIVILIZATION, Esme Wingfield-Stratford, D Sc., M.A., Ex-Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London First Edition 1928, Second Edition, 1930, Reprinted 1932, 1933, 1938, 1942, 1945 and 1948, pp 886-887

LIFE IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS in the late 18th and early 19TH century.

'We can only glance, in passing, at the meanest and most shameful of all the rural oppressions of this time, the sense of which was not the English countryside, but the Highlands of Scotland. Under the influence of the Romantic movement, and particularly of Sir Walter Scott, there was much sentiment about clan loyalty, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and so forth. The kilt and tartan, which were now again legalized became symbolic of

"Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago."

But the chieftains, whose functions as military leaders of the tribe had lapsed since the strong hand of Butcher Cumberland had brought the King's peace into their remotest fastness, were by no means sentimental where the main chance was concerned. Poor soil and primitive methods of cultivation might maintain a hardy population in contentment, but as a business proposition it would pay to get rid of the clansmen and turn the whole land into pasturage for sheep and cattle - only in the fullness of the Victorian era did the claims of pleasure demand the replacement of men by deer. Even before the "forty-five", evictions had started in the Isle of Skye, but it was towards the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth that practice became common of the chieftain turning on his tenants and driving them out of their homes, with every circumstance of brutality to shift for themselves or perish miserably. The first Duke of Sutherland, in the second decade of the century, gained an infamous pre-eminence by the wholesale eviction of his hapless people, who were forced out when their crops were standing, whose roofs, furniture, and even stock were burnt, some of whom were generously offered allotments on the barren sea-shore, without boats or the money to buy them - nay, a notice was posted on a church door threatening with eviction anyone giving shelter to those already evicted. The black list of robber and traitor chieftains then and subsequently includes such names as Campbell, Macdonald, Fraser, Cameron of Lochiel, Hamilton, Gordon, and many another whose tartan figures proudly at Highland gatherings to-day, as if the colours of Judas were an honorable distinction.'

Your faithful servant,