McGillivray's only idea of right was that of self-gratification. If to do right at any time was most productive of methods of self-promotion, why he would adopt that course, but only as a means of convenience. Unhampered by a sense of obligation and unchecked by conscientious scruple, his prodigious intellect and fertility of resource made Alexander McGillivray the most dangerous of men. Yet he could descant at length with all the mein of a moral philosopher on duty and obligation, the rights of man, the turpitude of wrong, the cruelty of injustice, the inhumanity of deception, and all else in the catalogue of morality. His familiarity with all these afforded him room for the amplest guilt. Self was his measuring rod, laid with accurate hand on the most contradictory of conditions. The amplitude of his personal forces enabled McGillivray to do what the fewest can successfully--wind his sinuous course through the most tangled conditions, while dealing with a number of conflicting agencies and causes, and yet equally dupe all, and if apprehended, be able so to summon to his defense a sufficiency of plausibility as actually to invest the whole situation with a sheen of fairness. Contradictory at many points, he could give to all the aspect of consistency. The only service that Alexander McGillivray rendered was that of preventing a general outbreak of the Indian tribes, which fact was due, not to his horror of blood, so much, as to the fact that using the deluded red man, he was able to hold him up as an object of fear, and thus elicit by agitation and apprehension, that which would conduce to his emolument. He never did right unless it was to his profit, and falsehood was preferable to truth, if it would serve a turn to his personal profit. He derived abundant encouragement from the conditions of his environment, to which his character was exactly adapted. The man and the occasion met in Alexander McGillivray.