WCP6739

[1] [p. 86]

Hall Grove, Bagshot

December 16, 1882

Sir,-I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter with the enclosed documents.

I am sorry you did not before ask me for the full report of the trial. You asked me only for contemporaneous accounts of it, other than the report. These I took some pains to procure, and I sent you everything of every description that I could discover exactly as I received it. The report itself was always at your service had you asked for it. I thought you had it, or had access to it. A copy is now enclosed, which I will thank you to return when you have made your examination of it. I should be glad if you would test the analysis which I have made of it, so far as it bears on McLeod's allegations, with the report itself. The copy I send you is a reprint, which is intended to be, and I believe is, a verbatim copy of the original report, with the omission only of the publisher's title-page, which was superfluous.

I have only to add with reference to the fresh matter which you introduce in your last letter, that you cannot surely consider that Celtic tradition, fostered by the very tales of McLeod, the truth of which is in question, and by the partisan writers who reproduce them and ignore everything else, affords any evidence whatever of the truth of those tales, in the face of the opinion of the jury and the judge, of the evidence which was given at the trial, and of McKid's confession of the exaggeration, amounting to ‘absolute falsehood,’ of what in substance were the very allegations which McLeod has reproduced, distorting, exaggerating, and adding to them.

One other observation I feel called upon to make on your letter. The character of the Sutherland clearances is not in question between us. I have never raised that question, and whatever opinion I may have respecting it, I am not required, and do not propose to raise it with you. What I challenge is the allegation by you, on McLeod's authority, of the commission of specific acts of culpability. Those allegations, both particular and general, which I have formally enumerated both in my letters to you and in the printed matter which I have sent to you, were, I say, conclusively disproved at the trial; and that being so, I also say that it is unjust to the memory of my father, and injurious to his reputation, as well as inconsistent with truthful narrative, to repeat them.

For the third time I beg to call your attention to your having [2] [p. 87] erroneously stated in the later edition of your book (an error not committed in your first edition), that the Kildonan clearances to which you refer on page 58 took place in the year 1816. They were carried out in 1819 and 1820, after my father had ceased to be factor, as you may see by examining Mr. Loch's book on the ‘Sutherland Improvements,' page 85 of the edition of 1820.

I am, Sir, Yours faithfully,

(Signed) THOS. SELLAR.

A. R. Wallace, Esq.

If you mean to imply that educated opinion in Scotland has ever accepted Donald McLeod's letters as trustworthy, or his allegations as true, I entirely dissent from that statement.