" From the perspective of the late twentieth century, there seems to be only one possible view of the Highland clearances, as they are called, but contemporary writers often showed different attitudes. Harriet Beecher Stowe went to Scotland and returned to the United States to write something called Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, in which she defended what the lairds were doing. And Robert Chambers, in his Picture of Scotland, published in 1827, wrote, “The landlords have very properly done all they could to substitute a population of sheep for innumerable hordes of "

― John McPhee , The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island