Sutherland and the Reay country

A SHORT TREATISE ON HOMESPUN,
CHIEFLY IN ITS RELATION TO
SUTHERLAND.
BY
Her Grace the Duchess of Sutherland.
Ever since this dying century has passed its prime, and the
discoveries of the wonderful power of steam, and of
electricity, have become part of its existence, we have learned
to associate the centres of the great industries of the world
with the hideousness, the squalor, the restlessness, the crime,
which are the natural result of human ascendency, in a
world that was planned to be Divine.
Heavily hangs the smoke of countless chimneys over
the brick and mortar erections that do penance for the
woods and hilly fields of long ago : pitilessly revolve, madly,
unceasingly, the countless wheels of a machinery which in
its iron grasp crushes the art of dead centuries, flinging it
out to a self-satisfied generation, that to its own crude fancy
moulds the shapeless wreck, crying "see, see" — triumphant
as the gutter child over its first mud pie.
Mr. Arnold White in his volume on "English Democracy"
says, " the folly and wickedness of those who destroyed the
spinning jennies, the engines, and the printing machines, at
the time of their introduction, have been denounced with so
unanimous a voice that it would be futile to suggest that the
ignorant peasants, or delirious mechanics, who obeyed the
first instincts of their nature, were animated by a true sense