ience and nonresistance. In fact disobedience and resistance
made up the ordinary life of that population. Some of those very clans
which it has been the fashion to describe as so enthusiastically loyal
that they were prepared to stand by James to the death, even when he was
in the wrong, had never, while he was on the throne, paid the smallest
respect to his authority, even when he was clearly in the right. Their
practice, their calling, had been to disobey and to defy him. Some of
them had actually been proscribed by sound of horn for the crime of
withstanding his lawful commands, and would have torn to pieces without
scruple any of his officers who had dared to venture beyond the passes
for the purpose of executing his warrant. The English Whigs were accused
by their opponents of holding doctrines dangerously lax touching the
obedience due to the chief magistrate. Yet no respectable English Whig
ever defended rebellion, except as a rare and extreme remedy for rare
and extreme evils. But among those Celtic chiefs whose loyalty has been
the theme of so much warm eulogy were some whose whole existence from
boyhood upwards had been one long rebellion. Such men, it is evident,
were not likely to see the Revolution in the light in which it appeared
to an Oxonian nonjuror. On the other hand they were not, like the
aboriginal Irish, urged to take arms by impatience of Saxon domination.
To such domination the Scottish Celt had never been subjected. He
occupied his own wild and sterile region, and followed his own national
usages. In his dealings with the Saxons, he was rather the oppressor
than the oppressed. He exacted black mail from them: he drove away their
flocks and herds; and they seldom dared to pursue him to his native
wilderness. They had never portioned out among themselves his dreary
region of moor and shingle. He had never seen the tower of his
hereditary chieftains occupied by an usurper who could not speak Gaelic,
and who looked on all who spoke it as brutes and slaves; nor had his
national and religious feelings ever been outraged by the power
and splendour of a church which he regarded as at once foreign and
heretical.

The real explanation of the readiness with which a large part of the
population of the Highlands, twice in the seventeenth century, drew
the sword for the Stuarts is to be found in the internal quarrels which
divided the commonwealth of clans. For there was a commonwealth of
clans, the image,