The Hanoverian government had thus to face, in 1746, a problem in some respects more difficult than that which the descendants of Malcolm Canmore had solved. The clan organization was complete, and clan loyalty had assumed the form of an extravagant devotion; a hostile feeling had arisen between Highlands and Lowlands, and all feeling of common nationality had been lost. There was no such important factor as the Church to help the change; religion was, on the whole, perhaps rather adverse than favourable to the process of Anglicization. On the other hand, the task was, in other aspects, very much easier. The Highlands had been affected by the events of the seventeenth century, and the chiefs were no longer mere freebooters and raiders. The Jacobite rising had weakened the Highlands, and the clans had been divided among themselves. It was not a united opposition that confronted the Government. Above all, the methods of land-tenure had already been rendered subject to very considerable modification. Since the reign of James VI, the law had been successful in attempting to ignore "all Celtic usages inconsistent with its principles", and it "regarded all persons possessing a feudal title as absolute proprietors of the land, and all occupants of the land who could not show a right derived from the proprietor, as simple tenants".[99] Thus the strongest support of the clan system had been removed before the suppression of the clans. The Government of George II placed the Highlands under military occupation, and began to root out every tendency towards the persistence of a clan organization. The clan, as a military unit, ceased to exist when the Highlanders were disarmed, and as a unit for administrative purposes when the heritable jurisdictions were abolished, and it could no longer claim to be a political force of any kind, for every vestige of independence was removed. The only individual characteristic left to the clan or to the Highlander was the tartan and the Celtic garb, and its use was prohibited under very severe penalties. These were measures which were not possible in the days of David as they were in those of George. But a further step was common to both centuries—the forfeiture of lands, and although a later Government restored many of these to descendants of the attainted chiefs, the magic spell had been broken, and the proprietor was no longer the head of the clan. Such measures, and the introduction of sheep-farming, had, within sixty years, changed the whole face of the Highlands.
Another century has been added to Sir Walter's Sixty Years Since, and it may be argued that all the resources of modern civilisation have failed to accomplish, in that period, what the descendants of Malcolm Canmore effected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is true as far as language is concerned, but only with regard to language. The Highlanders have not forgotten the Gaelic tongue as the Lowlanders had forgotten it by the outbreak of the War of Independence.[100] Various facts account for this. One of the features of recent days is an antiquarian revival, which has tended to preserve for Highland children the great intellectual advantage of a bi-lingual education. The very severance of the bond between chieftain and clan has helped to perpetuate the ancient language, for the people no longer adopt the speech of their chief, as, in earlier days, the Celt of Moray or of Fife adopted the tongue spoken by his Anglo-Norman lord, or learned by the great men of his own race at the court of David or of William the Lion. The Bible has been translated into Gaelic, and Gaelic has become the language of Highland religion. In the Lowlands of the twelfth century, the whole influence of the Church was directed to the extermination of the Culdee religion, associated with the Celtic language and with Celtic civilization. Above all, the difference lies in the rise of burghs in the Lowlands. Speech follows trade. Every small town on the east coast was a school of English language. Should commerce ever reach the Highlands, should the abomination of desolation overtake the waterfalls and the valleys, and other temples of nature share the degradation of the Falls of Foyers, we may then look for the disappearance of the Gaelic tongue.
Be all this as it may, it is undeniable that there has been in the Highlands, since 1745, a change of civilization without a displacement of race. We venture to think that there is some ground for the view that a similar change of civilization occurred in the Lowlands between 1066 and 1286, and, similarly, without a racial dispossession. We do not deny that there was some infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood between the Forth and the Moray Firth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but there is no evidence that it was a repopulation.
FOOTNOTES:
[94] In this discussion the province of Lothian is not included.
[95] Ri Mortuath is an Irish term. We find, more usually, in Scotland, the Mormaer.
[96] Op. cit., vol. i, p. 254.
[97] History of Scotland, vol. i, pp. 135-6.
[98] Celtic Scotland, vol. iii, pp. 303, 309.