heir childrens' children. Can you make an
angle of a single degree's subtension in the hereditary conditions
of these generations, or a dozen beyond? Can you detect a point of
departure by which the second generation would have diverged from
the first, or the third from the second, and have attained to a
higher life of comfort, intelligence, social and political position
had they remained in these mountain cottages, grubbed on their
cottage farms, and lived from hand to mouth on stinted rations of
oatmeal and potatoes, as their ancestors had done from time
immemorial? Can you see among all the hopeful possibilities of
Time's tomorrows, any such change for the better? You can sight no
such prospect with your telescope in that direction. Turn it around
and sweep the horizon of that other condition into which they were
thrust, weeping and wrathful against their will. Follow them across
the Atlantic to North America, to their homes in the States and in
the Canadas. Measure the angle they made in this transposition, and
the latitude and longitude of social and moral life they have
reached from this Sutherland point of departure. The sons of the
fathers and mothers who had their family nests stirred up so
cruelly, and scattered, like those of rooks, from their holdings in
the cliffs, gorges and glens of these cold mountains, are now among
the most substantial and respected men of the Western World. Some
of them to-day are mayors of towns of larger population than the
whole county of Sutherland. Some, doubtless, are Members of
Congress, representing each a constituency of one hundred thousand
persons, and a vast amount of intelligence, wealth and industry.
They are merchants, manufacturers, farmers, teachers and preachers,
filling all the professions and occupations of the continent. Is
not that an angle of promise to your telescope? Is not that a line
of divergence which has conducted these evicted populations, at a
small distance from this point of departure, into the better
latitudes of human experience? The selling of this Scotch Joseph to
America was more purely and simply a pecuniary transaction than that
recorded in Scripture; for in that the unkind and jealous brothers
sold the innocent boy for envy, not for the love of pelf, though the
Ishmaelites bought him on speculation. But not for envy was the
Sutherland lad sold and shipped to a foreign land, but rather for a
contemptuous estimate of his money valu