MR BALFOUR AND HIS SCOTCH ESTATE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 46, 21 August 1891, Page 29

MR BALFOUR AND HIS SCOTCH ESTATE.

(From the Nation.) We have received the following communication from a correspondent who baa latelj Tinted Mr Balfour's Scotch esUte. The letter speaks itself:— ~ " The subject of the Balfour connection with Strathconan should not be dropped with the few misleading sentences which have got into circulation anent the recent sals of the beautiful glen and surroaadings to the great English brewer. " Strathcon&n estate lies, roughly, nearly aast and west from where it joins with the two Saotwells on the confines of Contin, to where its mountain ranges join those of Monar and Glen Strathfarrar to the west, in the heart of the great moors of Ross- shire. The atrath is onlj about twenty miles in length and varies in width from one mile to three miles. These greater widths are found at the foot of the rivers Meanie and Ooarun, which have added to the area and value of the strath by forming valuable del Us. Along the banks of the Meig (which is the river of the strath and not the Oonan), and up the glens on each side, are the sweetest meadows, at one time yielding grain and other food for eleven or twelve hundred souls, but now, directly or indirectly, almost all devoted to sheep and game. " Mr Gerald Balfour, before the Select Committee on Golonisa. tion last July, gave a series of misleading statements, together with answers equally misleading, to questions put by Sir James Fergusson —with the intention of making the impression that the Balfours had exercised a beneficent power in the strath, and not a destructive one, as was generally understood in the Highlands. Mr G. Balfour cime before the Committee after Messrs Murdoch and Mackenzie (who had assailed the strongholds of the emigrationists) had left London, and he had thus the last word. " Even Mr Balfour, however, admitted that the population had been reduced during the Balfour reign from 870 to 233, and even the few among these— viz., 16 crofter families— who have land at all, had been reduced from farmers to mere crof ters, living moßtly by wages earned outside their own lots. To thi? there is to be added that the families of the few who remain are abnormally small. Mr Balfoar gave a highly satisfactory explanation— that the people were now so well educated they had not the old disinclination to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The real explanation, however, as can be ascertained hereafter, when the fear of Balfour shall no longer reign in the strath, that no man or woman dared keep anyone at home who was not as necessary as a dog to the purpose of sport. There are old men and old women there, maurning the dispergion of their families, and dreading the arrival of the younger members at maturity, when they also must leave the fireside vacant and the heart of the widowed mother or lonely father, to merge the sorrow of parting ia the paraljeia of despair in old age. "I will now go into detul over the forced and fraudulent removals of which this beautiful strath has been the scene. " Stratbconan, to-day, is the successful result of a cold-blooded experiment, which affords a model on which to mould the character, condition, and destinies of Ireland. Reduce the population, crush the spirit of the remainder, and they are content to accept as a blessing the crumbs which fall from the sportsman's tables. In other words, the remnant of men are now in possession of small lots in the worst part of the strath, and which do not afford them more than half subsistence. Here they are as quiet as sheep, from fear of not having the crumbs of employment which are to be had during the few weeks in the shooting season. Even these are so far subservient to sport that not one of them but four has an inch of the 74,000 acres of moor which flank the arable of the glen, whilst of this they have now only what was at one time the refuse. " Add to these things, that the perfection of Balfourism is shown in this : that not a person in the whole strath will venture to complain, or even to explain, how the reduction has taken place. Fortunately, however, there ara two valuaole oolonies trom the strath among whom are vigorous minds and good memories. The one is at Knockferal, above Stratbpeffer, and the other at Mulbuie, to the south-east of Dingwall, in the Bbck Ise. So that for all the success with which terror has been employed to still the voices of the victims, there are numbers of excellent witnesses to be had to give willing testimony to the fact of the Balfoar-Desolation of Strathconan . "It has been remarked that the present Balfour has passed through Irish troubles with something like a charmed life. The outcasts of Strathconan have their own explanation of the Chief Secretary's immunity from death in Ireland. The Curse of Stratbconan hangs over the family, anl, like his father and his brothers, he v reserved for another end 1 One heart-broken woman let out a mere allusion to this curse:— 1 How could the Balfours escape the curse, considering the manner in which they came by their possessions 1 ' But the spirit of fear dominated bo that the moment Bhe noticed the eagerness with which I regarded the remark, she almost lost her utterance, and I could get no moie from her. But I got it elsewhere. 11 FINLAGAN."