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THE INDIAN PROBLEM STILL UNSOLVED.

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the Old World had from the beginning come to the Natives! The tomahawk never would have grown red: those primitive tribes would long since have become vast communities of illuminated, Christian men; and we should have had a long holiday of peace with our brethren of the forest.'

Our Treatment of the Indians.-Some few plain words should be said on this subject, and I may as well say them here, and not have to refer to the matter again. I shall go no further into the sad history of these fading races than is required to show our connection with the aboriginal possessors of the soil. Nor is it necessary; every American reader becomes familiar with the subject; it is taught in all our school-books, and is found throughout our colonial history No subject has received more attention. From the early settlement of the country, the Federal Congress has dealt with no problem which has so long and hopelessly baffled a solution, as the Indian question. It is safe to state, as a general proposition, that our whole treatment of the Indian tribes, from the beginning, has been marked by the greatest generosity, and the most continued injustice. Nor does this involve any contradiction. Aside from the vast sums that were expended by the original colonies, and have been since by philanthropic and good men, for what has been called the civilization of the Indians, the amount which has been appropriated for them from the Federal treasury has amounted to several hundred millions of dollars. More money has been appropriated under the pretext of civilizing them, than has been expended by the people of the United States in civilizing all the rest of the world. And yet we have been always at war with them. It has been one continual record of butchery and revenge from the first landing of the Spaniards on our Southern coast, down to the massacre of Gen. Canby.

I esteem nothing as sacred in the exclusive claim of the savage to any portion of God's green world or free waters. The earth was given for the service of the human family; and any exclusive right, by conquest or discovery, to the absolute control of any part of it, without regard to the well-being of its original inhabitants, is founded in essential injustice. The only basis. upon which such claims can rest with original races, is fair treaty and the corresponding obligations of humanity and good neighborhood, which proceed therefrom.

There is no more justice in the discoverer entering upon the territory of an unknown people, and driving them out like wild beasts, or exterminating them by the vices of so-called civilization, than there is in the conqueror who invades the soil of a civilized nation, and appropriates its possessions to the conqueror's use.

True, indeed, fertile tracts of the earth are to be occupied by civilized men, and the whole globe is yet to be turned into a garden. This must be

1 I have elsewhere treated this subject as fully as my space would allow. The American conscience has been too easily lulled into security by the impious asjumption that the Aborigines of this country are incapable of civilization. This demoralizing doctrine has

done mischief enough. Carry it out to its logical conclusion, and these poor children of Nature could look forward to no other doom than extermination, which is not a fate that the humanity of this age can contemplate with complacency.

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THE NEMESIS OF THE RED-MAN'S CURSE.

done, too, through the agency of discovery, settlement, colonization, agricul ture, and all the arts of civilization. But there are cor.ditions affixed by the

Creator by which this process must be regulated.

There is no more mystery in the gradual disappearance or extinction of the Indians of this continent, or the aborigines of any other part of the world, than there is in the extinction of the wild beasts. The modern doctrine, that the fittest must survive in the great struggle—that the weakest must go under -that the strongest must prevail-has so warped the public conscience, that the whole country has resigned itself to a shameful apathy concerning the fate of the Indian, and hugged to itself what comfort it could find in this Darwinian justification. The great mass of the American people have looked upon the fading away of the Indian races with the same indifference with which the geologist contemplates the extinction of the Saurian races. But the principle is nevertheless true, as we find it laid down in the eternal code of justice and divine legislation, that, 'Woe unto the world because of offences, for of fences must needs come; but woe unto the man through whom they come.' All through our history we find frequent and striking illustrations of the truth that might does not make right-which is the code of barbarism, and not of humanity. The Nemesis of the red-man's curse still pursues the pale-face. Scarcely a day has gone by in our frontier annals but some so-called civilized man's home has smoked in flames, or his wife or children been brained by the tomahawk of Indian vengeance.

That large class of men who soothe their consciences by the brazen and blasphemous assumption, that the Indian is incapable of civilization, find all history at war with them. In fact, we search in vain for any one nation except our own, that has not had to climb up to civilized life from the depths of barbarism.

Nineteen hundred years ago the Roman standard first floated on the shores of Britain. Then a race of barbarians—our ancestors-clothed in the skins of wild beasts, roamed over the uncultivated island. The tread of the Legions was then heard on the plains of Africa and Asia, and the name of Rome was written on the front of the world. Two thousand years have rolled by, and Julius Cæsar, and all the Cæsars, the Senate, the People, and the Empire of Rome, have passed away like a dream. The population of the Eternal City now falls short of that of Brooklyn, while that island of bai. barians has emulated Rome in her conquests, and not only planted and unfurled her standard in the three quarters of the globe that owned the Roman sway, but laid her all-grasping hand on new continents. Possessing the energy and valor of her Saxon and Norman ancestors, she has remained unconquered and unbroken amidst the changes that have ended the history of other nations. Like her own island that sits firm and tranquil in the ocean that rolls round it, she has stood amid the ages of man, and the overthrow of empires.

LAW OF CIVILIZATION.

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If the policy of the Romans had been extermination instead of civilization, where would the descendants of the ancient Britons have been to-day? If from the beginning the same policy had been displayed by the settlers of this continent, which was carried out by the Romans in their settlements and conquests, the Indian races whom we found here in their primitive state, -vastly superior in intellect, culture, spiritual conceptions of God and his appropriate worship, and in all the capabilities for progress and civilization,— would long ago have grown into a great civilized people by themselves, or they would at once have been recognized as citizens, participating with our fathers in all the blessings of civic life. It is well enough to talk about the fittest being the survivor when we come to the inferior orders of animate creation; but this talk will not do when we come to man, made in the image of God, destined to endless life; the equal brother of the most gifted and enlightened, and as fairly entitled as he, to participate in the great fortunes of the human. race, inheriting from a common Father capacities for improvement through endless ages. Here Darwinianism is blasphemy, if indeed that illustrious savant would countenance so brutal a doctrine or so gross a perversion of his system, which I more than doubt.

In tracing back the stream of civilization, we glance for a moment behind the times of the Cæsars-beyond the founders of the Roman Empire. They had received their civilization from cultured races. Greece herself, who became the mother of refinement and the teacher of all the ages, was but the child of earlier and mightier empires. She was but a colony that went off from the east; so, too, old Egypt, which reached so high a point in culture, was but a child of an older civilization which spread westward from the great heart of still older Asia.

Thus the river of civilization has refreshed instead of submerging nations; and this abominable doctrine of the impossibility of civilizing the North American Indian finds no comfort or sanction in the records of mankind. It had 'no place in the theory or practice of the first settlers of New England. The Plymouth colony had no trouble with the Indians. For a long period they were looked upon as friends, and treated as neighbors; their rights were respected they were civilized to a considerable extent. Thousands of them were, through the labors of Eliot, Williams, Edwards, Brainard, and other good and great men, gathered into schools, colleges and churches: while experience, not only with individuals but with whole tribes, feeble as the efforts have been, have demonstrated the capacity of the Indian races for equal culture and elevation with the men of any other race-always excepting the Caucasian-the highest form which humanity has yet reached. The careful reader of the efforts that were made by the Puritans and their descendants to make Indians civilized, Christian men, will find among them the most fascinating and beautiful records of the history of virtue and religion.

Penn Founds his Capital, Jan., 1683.-His reasons for the choice of the

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