The country which
he inhabits was, in the days of many now alive,
inaccessible to the laws, not only of England, which
have not even yet penetrated thither, but to those
to which our neighbours of Scotland are subjected,
and which must be supposed to be, and no doubt
actually are, founded upon the general principles of
justice and equity which pervade every civilized
country. Amongst their mountains, as among the
North American Indians, the various tribes were
wont to make war upon each other, so that each
man was obliged to go armed for his own protection.
These men, from the ideas which they entertained
of their own descent and of their own
consequence, regarded themselves as so many cavaliers
or men-at-arms, rather than as the peasantry
of a peaceful country. Those laws of the ring,
as my brother terms them, were unknown to the
race of warlike mountaineers; that decision of
quarrels by no other weapons than those which nature
has given every man, must to them have
seemed as vulgar and as preposterous as to the
Noblesse of France. Revenge, on the other hand,
must have been as familiar to their habits of society
as to those of the Cherokees or Mohawks. It
is indeed, as described by Bacon, at bottom a kind
of wild untutored justice; for the fear of retaliation
must withhold the hands of the oppressor where
there is no regular law to check daring violence.
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