s greeted from the
sick-bed, feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor.
He prayed beside the poor creature, and, on coming away, slipped
something into her hand. I learned that not during the ten years in
which she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing from
the proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and that
the parish had no session-funds. I saw her husband a few days after,--an
old worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek and
eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattered
dress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means of
living, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbors, who
had so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never given
them anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who
had helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull of
Cantyre, and the other had died of fever when on a West India voyage;
and though their poor girl was very dutiful, and staid in their crazy
hut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could she
do in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings? It
has been recently decided by the British Parliament, that in cases of
this kind the starving poor shall not be permitted to enter the law
courts of the country, there to sue for a pittance to support life,
until an intermediate newly-erected court, alien to the Constitution,
before which they must plead at their own expense, shall have first
given them permission to prosecute their claims. And I doubt not that
many of the English gentlemen whose votes swelled the majority, and made
it such, are really humane men, friendly to an equal-handed justice, and
who hold it to be the peculiar glory of the Constitution, as well shown
by De Lolme, that it has not one statute-book for the poor, and another
for the rich, but the same law and the same administration of law for
all. They surely could not have seen that the principle of their Poor
Law Act for Scotland sets the pauper beyond the pale of the Constitution
in the first instance, that he may be starved in the second. The
suffering paupers of this miserable island cottage would have all their
wants fully satisfied in the grave, long ere they could establish at
their own expense, at Edinburgh, their claim to enter a court of law. I
know not a fitter case for the interposition of our lately f