It must be admitted that he had just cause of irritation against the Murrays, first for disputing the claim of his father to the Lovat title and estates, a claim indisputably just; nor was their project for constituting Lord Salton the head of the clan Fraser, either a wise or an equitable scheme. It was heard with loud indignation in that part of the country where the original stock of this time-honoured race were, until their name was stained by the crimes of Simon Fraser, held in love and reverence. It was heard by the Master of Lovat perhaps with less expression of his feelings than by his followers; but the meditated affront was avenged, and avenged by a scheme which none but a demon could have devised. It was avenged; but it brought ruin on the head of the avenger. Perhaps in no other country, at the same period, could the wrongs of an individual have been visited upon an aggressor with the same dispatch and ruthless determination as in the Highlands. Until the year 1748, when the spirit of clanship was broken, never to be restored, those "hereditary monarchies founded on custom, and allowed by general consent rather than established by laws,"[136] existed in their full vigour. The military ranks of the clans was fixed and continual during the rare intervals of local quiet, and every head of a family was captain of his own tribe.[137] The spirit of rivalry between the clans kept up a taste for hostility, and converted rapine into a service of honour. Revenge was considered as a duty, and superstition aided the dictates of a fiery and impetuous spirit. A people naturally humane, naturally forbearing, had thus, by the habits of ages immemorial, become remorseless plunderers and resolute avengers. When any affront was offered to a chieftain, the clan was instantly summoned. They came from their straths and their secluded valleys, wherein there was little intercourse with society in general to tame their native pride, or to weaken the predominant emotion of their hearts,--their pride in their chieftain. They came fearlessly, trusting, not only in the barriers which Nature had given them in their rocks and fastnesses, but in the unanimity of their purpose. Each clan had its stated place of meeting, and when it was summoned upon any emergency, the fiery cross, one end burning, the other wrapt in a piece of linen stained with blood, was sent among the aroused clansmen, traversing those wild moors, and penetrating into the secluded glens of those sublime regions. It was sent, by two messengers, throughout the country, and passed from hand to hand, these messengers shouting, as they went, the war-cry of the clan, which was echoed from rock to rock. And then arose the cry of the coronach, that wail, appropriate to the dead, but uttered also by women, as the fiery cross roused them from their peaceful occupations, and hurried from them their sons and their husbands.