He had no personal reason to wish the Glencoe men ill.

There had been no feud between them and his family.

His property lay in a district where their tartan was never seen.

Yet he hated them with a hatred as fierce and implacable as if they had laid waste his fields, burned his mansion, murdered his child in the cradle.
To what cause are we to ascribe so strange an antipathy?
This question perplexed the Master's contemporaries; and any answer which may now be offered ought to be offered with diffidence.

[222] The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the state.
This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit.