ge, a slave, a Papist, a cutthroat, and a thief, [323]

This contemptuous loathing lasted till the year 1745, and was then for a
moment succeeded by intense fear and rage. England, thoroughly alarmed,
put forth her whole strength. The Highlands were subjugated rapidly,
completely, and for ever. During a short time the English nation, still
heated by the recent conflict, breathed nothing but vengeance. The
slaughter on the field of battle and on the scaffold was not sufficient
to slake the public thirst for blood. The sight of the tartan inflamed
the populace of London with hatred, which showed itself by unmanly
outrages to defenceless captives. A political and social revolution
took place through the whole Celtic region. The power of the chiefs was
destroyed: the people were disarmed: the use of the old national garb
was interdicted: the old predatory habits were effectually broken; and
scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strange reflux of
public feeling began. Pity succeeded to aversion. The nation execrated
the cruelties which had been committed on the Highlanders, and forgot
that for those cruelties it was itself answerable. Those very Londoners,
who, while the memory of the march to Derby was still fresh, had
thronged to hoot and pelt the rebel prisoners, now fastened on the
prince who had put down the rebellion the nickname of Butcher. Those
barbarous institutions and usages, which, while they were in full force,
no Saxon had thought worthy of serious examination, or had mentioned
except with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they became
objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the
chiefs been turned into mere landlords, when it became the fashion to
draw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the landlord and the
indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have forgotten that the ancient
Gaelic polity had been found to be incompatible with the authority of
law, had obstructed the progress of civilisation, had more than once
brought on the empire the curse of civil war. As they had formerly
seen only the odious side of that polity, they could now see only the
pleasing side. The old tie, they said, had been parental: the new tie
was purely commercial. What could be more lamentable than that the head
of a tribe should eject, for a paltry arrear of rent, tenants who were
his own flesh and blood, tenants whose forefathers had often with their
bodies covered his foref