more or less throughout the eighteenth
century; and that they have been thorns in the side of Tory England
through the whole of the nineteenth. As for the Highlands, they held out
against the Stuarts till England had rejected that impossible dynasty;
and then they rallied round the Stuarts as the enemies of the Saxon.
General Wade's roads and the forts in the Great Glen, aided by a few
trifles of Glencoe massacres, kept them quiet for a moment. But it was
only for a moment. The North is once more in open revolt. Dr. Clark and
the crofters are its mode of expressing itself.

Nor is that all. The Celtic ideas have remained unaltered. Of course, I
am not silly enough to believe there is any such thing as a Celtic race.
I use the word merely as a convenient label for the league of the
unconquered peoples in Britain. Ireland alone contains half-a-dozen
races; and none of them appear to have anything in common with the Pict
of Aberdeenshire or the West-Welsh of Cornwall. All I mean when I speak
of Celtic ideas and Celtic ideals is the ideas and ideals proper and
common to unconquered races. As compared with the feudalised and
contented serf of South-Eastern England, are not the Irish peasant, the
Scotch clansman, the "statesman" of the dales, the Cornish miner, free
men every soul of them? English landlordism, imposed from without upon
the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside,
has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the
native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been
brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the
west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.

As long as South-Eastern England and the Normanised or feudalised Saxon
lowlands of Scotland contained all the wealth, all the power, and most
of the population of Britain, the Celtic ideals had no chance of
realising themselves. But the industrial revolution of the present
century has turned us right-about-face, has transferred the balance of
power from the secondary strata to the primary strata in Britain; from
the agricultural lowlands to the uplands of coal and iron, the cotton
factories, the woollen trade. Great industrial cities have grown up in
the Celtic or semi-Celtic area--Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds,
Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast, Aberdeen, Cardiff. The Celt--that is to
say, the mountaineer and the man of the untouched country--reproduces
hi