SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONDITIONS. 545 



tion of the Hebrides. The fighting, the hunting, the feasting 

 class fought, and hunted, and feasted, at the expense of the 

 class that stayed at home to till the soil. The sword was a 

 mightier weapon than the spade ; prowess in arms was of 

 weightier concern than skill in agriculture. The lusty 

 young men who followed their chiefs to the field of battle, 

 looked down with contempt upon the helots who toiled in 

 the field of corn. The bards flattered the vanity of the 

 chiefs by fulsome eulogies, and encouraged their predatory 

 instincts by the glorification of slaughter. And the pro- 

 letariat sweated at their spades, and reared their cattle, 

 to support the idle crowd in a state of barbaric splendour. 

 Such, stripped of its glamour, is an outline of the operation 

 of the clan system in the Outer Hebrides. 



The Church acted as a buffer between the two classes, 

 and mitigated the sufferings of the one, while it restrained 

 the tyranny of the other. What it failed to effect by moral 

 suasion, it succeeded in accomplishing by the terrors of 

 superstition. It insisted upon the observance of Christian 

 rites, and employed the weapon of excommunication to 

 enforce its decrees. But it could not, even if it tried, alter 

 the fabric of the social system ; and its own polity was in 

 accord with unquestioning submission to authority. When, 

 as we have seen, the Reformation subverted the old order 

 of things, and the Outer Hebrides were temporarily 

 deprived of religious teaching, the unrestrained evils of the 

 clan system gathered force until they culminated, at the 

 end of the sixteenth century, in a state of anarchy. 



The reforming agencies at work in the seventeenth 

 century curbed the power of the chiefs, and stripped them 

 of a portion of their semi-regal magnificence. The 

 arbitrary authority which they exercised over their depen- 

 dents was, in a measure, curtailed ; and a gradual im- 

 provement in social, religious, and economic conditions was 

 initiated. The chiefs of the Mackenzies introduced into 

 Lewis a more enlightened form of civilisation than it had 

 ever previously enjoyed. But they flooded the island with 

 their own followers, and granted them land on easy condi- 



