The Anglo-Gaelic era of Highland history commences, as has been pointed out, with the decay of the Jacobite cause. The changes that have taken place since 1745 have deeply affected the destiny and character of the people. In some respects the contact with the fresh forces brought into play was beneficial, in other respects it was a moral loss; but it is to be hoped that on the whole there has been considerable gain, and that not altogether material.
Under the social and educational changes that have been taking place during the last century the Highlanders have shown wonderful adaptableness in the course of the process they have been undergoing. The revival of a more earnest spirit of Christianity in many districts has completely altered the social habits of the people, while the influence of educational agencies has reached the most secluded glen and remote headland.
The English language is everywhere taught, the people, knowing its use in the sphere of secular success, preferring to have their children educated in a purely English rather than in a Gaelic school. The present rising generation all understand and talk a little Saxon of some sort, but Gaelic will be the language of the mass of the population for some generations yet. English thought and culture also reach the people through the hundreds of University-bred ministers who preach Gaelic in Highland pulpits.
These important changes in the Celtic world are not effected without many venerable regrets being uttered by sentimentalists both in Ireland and Scotland. If we look across the channel we find that the Irish Gael indulges in the same unpractical wail over an irrevocable past, that we find so prevalent with his brother of Albin. The cry of the sentimentalist there is even more intense, more persistent. The unpromising present of the Gael there appears to attract like a magnet all the revolutionary sympathies of the usually stolid Teutonic heart, after a little contact of the races. Just as in their political difficulties the Irish have always looked for help from Spain, France, or America, so unless the gods somehow interfere to preserve their native tongue, all they can or will do, waiting for external or divine deliverance, is to take up the refrain—“It is dying.” This is how an Irish poet, the Rev. M. Mullin, Clonfert, sings with incomparable sadness:—
“It is fading! it is fading! like the leaves upon the trees;
It is dying! it is dying! like the Western Ocean breeze!
It is fastly disappearing, as footsteps on the shore,
Where the Barrow, and the Erne, and Lough Swilly’s waters roar;
Where the parting sunbeam kisses the Corrib in the West,
And the ocean, like a mother, clasps the Shannon to its breast;