The Hanoverian government had thus to face, in 1746, a problem in some respects more difficult than that which the descendants of Malcolm Canmore had solved. The clan organization was complete, and clan loyalty had assumed the form of an extravagant devotion; a hostile feeling had arisen between Highlands and Lowlands, and all feeling of common nationality had been lost. There was no such important factor as the Church to help the change; religion was, on the whole, perhaps rather adverse than favourable to the process of Anglicization. On the other hand, the task was, in other aspects, very much easier. The Highlands had been affected by the events of the seventeenth century, and the chiefs were no longer mere freebooters and raiders. The Jacobite rising had weakened the Highlands, and the clans had been divided among themselves. It was not a united opposition that confronted the Government. Above all, the methods of land-tenure had already been rendered subject to very considerable modification. Since the reign of James VI, the law had been successful in attempting to ignore "all Celtic usages inconsistent with its principles", and it "regarded all persons possessing a feudal title as absolute proprietors of the land, and all occupants of the land who could not show a right derived from the proprietor, as simple tenants".[99] Thus the strongest support of the clan system had been removed before the suppression of the clans. The Government of George II placed the Highlands under military occupation, and began to root out every tendency towards the persistence of a clan organization. The clan, as a military unit, ceased to exist when the Highlanders were disarmed, and as a unit for administrative purposes when the heritable jurisdictions were abolished, and it could no longer claim to be a political force of any kind, for every vestige of independence was removed. The only individual characteristic left to the clan or to the Highlander was the tartan and the Celtic garb, and its use was prohibited under very severe penalties. These were measures which were not possible in the days of David as they were in those of George. But a further step was common to both centuries--the forfeiture of lands, and although a later Government restored many of these to descendants of the attainted chiefs, the magic spell had been broken, and the proprietor was no longer the head of the clan. Such measures, and the introduction of sheep-farming, had, within sixty years, changed the whole face of the Highlands.