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.
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