uld have done if they had travelled in Thibet; and
very curious reading those books are now after the lapse of something
over a century. The whole of the Highlands were wild, unfrequented,
and desolate, under the rude jurisdiction of the heads of the great
Highland houses, whose clansmen, as savage and as desperately
courageous as Sioux or Pawnees, offered their lords an almost
idolatrous devotion. Nominally the clans were under the authority of
the English Crown and the Scottish law; actually they recognized no
rule but the rule of their chiefs, who wielded a power as despotic as
that of any feudal seigneur in the days of the old regime. The heroes
of the Ossianic poems--the Finns and Dermats whom colonization had
transplanted from Irish to Scottish legend--were not more unfettered or
more antiquely chivalrous than the clansmen who boasted of their
descent from them. Scotland was more unlike England in the middle of
the last century than Russia is unlike Sicily to day.

There were several things in Charles's favor. To begin with, the
disarmament of the clans, which had been insisted {209} upon after "the
Fifteen," had been carried out in such a fashion as was now to prove
most serviceable to the Young Pretender; for the only clans that had
been really disarmed were the Mackays, Campbells, and Sutherlands, who
were loyal enough to the House of Hanover, and gave up their weapons
very readily to prove their loyalty. But the other clans--the clans
that ever cherished the lingering hope of a Stuart restoration--were
not in reality disarmed at all. They made a great show of surrendering
to General Wade weapons that were utterly worthless as weapons of war,
honey-combed, crippled old guns and swords and axes; but the good guns
and swords and axes, the serviceable weapons, these were all carefully
stowed away in fitting places of concealment, ready for the hour when
they might be wanted again. That hour had now come. So that, thanks
to the Disarming Act of 1716, the Government found its chief allies in
the north of Scotland practically defenceless and unarmed, while the
clans that kept pouring in to rally around the standard of the young
invader were as well armed as any of those who had fought so stoutly at
Sheriffmuir. Yet another advantage on the adventurer's side was due to
the tardiness with which news travelled in those times. Charles had
been for many days in the Highlands, preparing the way for the rising,
b