he was offered by Lord Holderness a lucrative appointment under government, but that he refused it on principle. And there are not wanting Celtic fanatics who, discarding all the rest of his vile history, hold him, upon this little morsel of his own evidence in his own favour, to have been a noblehearted man of sensitive honour.

It is impossible to pass away from these sad annals of fraud and violence without a brief glance at the political moral taught by more than two hundred years of hereditary war with the law. It may join, with many other dark chapters in British history, in teaching the true functions of a governing people, towards races behind them in enlightenment, and in the hereditary subjugation of the bad passions. Nor are the lessons so taught absolutely useless at this day for practical purposes. If we be now beyond the time when instruction of so tragic a character is necessary to teach statesmen their duty towards any portion of the United Kingdom, yet this empire is daily coming more and more in contact with wild tribes in distant lands, and is daily requiring further instruction in the difficult art of properly ruling them. In the history of the Macgregors we see, on the one hand, a ferocious race, in whom the predatory and sanguinary passions are nourished from generation to generation,

acting after their kind; on the other, a government which uses nothing but the sword, and, unless it can carry that to the extent of extermination, ever uses it in vain. The law is the avenger alone; it is never the parent, the instructor, or the protector; and its vengeance ever reprovoked is never satiated.

To judge in any comparative way of the merits of the two parties, is a difficult ethical problem. To maintain that the conduct of the government was just, is out of the question. It is difficult to find out the best means of punishing crime, but it is easy to decide that there cannot be a worse than the handing over of the offender to the irresponsible vengeance of his enemy. On the other hand, it would be somewhat more preposterous to follow some Celtic apologists in the view that the Macgregors were a pure and persecuted race, whose outrages were but the recalcitrations of high-minded men against calculating oppression. They had plundered their neighbours, and defied the government. Governments commonly consist of men with human passions, liable to be directed by the opinions and prejudices of the time. If they are pricked, they will bleed; if they are tickled, they will laugh; and if they are wronged, will they not revenge? But the short, sharp remedy of the sword has ever been too

readily resorted to to cut the knot, and sever the entanglements which men find in dealings with tribes less civilised than themselves. Thus the barbarian has seen civilisation only in its terrors, and has recoiled from it instead of courting it. To be superior to angry impulses; and treat with abstract justice, and a view to their enlightenment and improvement, tribes who themselves are full of injustice and cruelty; is one of the latest and most precious acquisitions of a high civilisation.*

* How much of the spirit which animated the proceedings against the Macgregors yet lingers in minds reared under the shelter of British institutions, may be gathered from the following remarks by an Australian author, incorporating a still more expressive quotation from a writer on America. They are made in reference to the indignant feelings expressed by the bushmen on the occasion of some of their number having been hanged for killing natives:

"The gun is the only law the black fears; the only power that deters him from murder and plunder; and the only available administrator of punishment for his offences."

"Those who denounce the squatter as a murderer and landrobber, it has been well said in Kennedy's account of Texas, 'take no thought of the spirit that has impelled him onwards, of the qualities he is constrained to display, and the social ameliorations of which he is the pioneer. He loves the wilderness for the independence it confers-for the sovereignty which it enables him to wield by dint of his personal énergies. The forest is subject to his axe-its inhabitants to his gun.' By daily toil, and at the risk of his life, he earns his bread, and leads a life of conscious independence, where the grand old forests have stood for ages, and where the foot of the white man never trod before. His life is one of continued labour, solitude, and, too often, warfare. He has an enemy untiring, and often

While the name of Macgregor remained under legal proscription, those members of the clan who desired to enjoy the privileges of peaceful civilisation adopted the names of their maternal relations, or changed the forbidden shape into Gregorson, Macgregory, or Gregory. This last name recals singular and interesting associations, realised in a well-known anecdote, which represents the unpleasant surprise of the Aberdeen professor on having to receive Rob Roy in his study as a distinguished and influential kinsman. During a great part of the tissue of hereditary crimes which we have just been recording, this sapling of the family produced an hereditary succession of genius, worth, and learn

waiting long for his time-cunning, wary, and expert—frequently displaying great courage, and, if he has wrongs to avenge, heedless on whom he wreaks his vengeance, so long as a white man is the victim. Surely, then, the man who is the pioneer of civilisation—who, going out into the wilderness, spends his days in toil and danger, and his nights in dreariness and solitude-who must send out his shepherd with a musket on his shoulder, and sling his rifle at his side, when he rides among his herds—who, making a lodgement in the bush, causes the desert to rejoice, and blossom as the rose,' and opens the way for the smiling villages, the good old British institutions, and the happy population which follow: surely this man has not laboured in vain, but has deserved, at least, leniency at our hands."-(Excursions and Adventures in New South Wales, by John Henderson, i., 145.) The author, in explanation of his plea for leniency, says, that he does not mean to justify "the causeless and indiscriminate slaughter which has often taken place."

72 PROCEEDINGS AGAINST THE CLAN GREGOR.

ing, such, in the steadiness and continuity of its growth, as the world has not perhaps exemplified in any other family; nor has its lustre yet departed.

It was not until the year 1775 that the opprobrium thrown on the name of Macgregor was removed by an act of the British parliament. Since that day, the once dreaded name has been sounded with respect at drawing-room doors, in levees, in bank parlours, and on the hustings. It has fallen to the lot of many eminent and worthy men. And singularly enough, the only Highland clan which strives to keep its ancient ties, and assemble together in a body, is that same Clan Gregor, to whom it was prohibited to convene in numbers exceeding four at a time.