ge 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. We daily see men do for their party, for
their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political
and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or to avenge
themselves. At a temptation directly addressed to our private cupidity
or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm.
But, virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that
it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to
confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind.
He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart
against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself
that his intentions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is
doing a little evil for the sake of a great good. By degrees he comes
altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the
end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which
would shock a buccaneer. There is no reason to believe that Dominic
would, for the best archbishopric in christendom, have incited
ferocious marauders to plunder and slaughter a peaceful and industrious
population, that Everard Digby would for a dukedom have blown a large
assembly of people into the air, or that Robespierre would have murdered
for hire one of the thousands whom he murdered from philanthropy.

The Master of Stair seems to have proposed to himself a truly great and
good end, the pacification and civilisation of the Highlands. He was, by
the acknowledgment of those who most hated him, a man of large views. He
justly thought it monstrous that a third part of Scotland should be in
a state scarcely less savage than New Guinea, that letters of fire
and sword should, through a third part of Scotland, be, century after
century, a species of legal process, and that no attempt should be made
to apply a radical remedy to such evils. The independence affected by a
crowd of petty sovereigns, the contumaci