Page:Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison Vol. 1.djvu/91

Rh  plans for your future happiness, and was communicating to me his directions upon the subject of clearing your understandings, and making you acquainted with those arts by which the white people are enabled to live with so much ease and comfort, how much must he have been grieved and surprised to hear that two of his people had been murdered by some of those very persons for whose welfare and happiness his thoughts were thus anxiously employed. Are these delightful plains, which were made by the Great Spirit to afford nourishment for his children, to be for ever deluged with blood? Will foolish men never learn that war and bloodshed are as offensive to the maker of us all, as they are destructive of the happiness of those which might engage in it? My Children, aim your arrows at the buffaloe, the bear, and the deer, which are provided for your use, but spare your brother man; let those whom the Great Spirit has placed upon the same Island, live in peace with each other. Let the nations to whom it has pleased God to give abundance of the comforts of life, share them with their neighbors who may be deficient.

My Children, by this principle your great father, the President of the United States is strongly actuated; he bids me inform you that it is his ardent wish to see you prosperous and happy; he has directed me to take every means in my power to have you instructed in those arts, which the Great Spirit has long ago communicated to the white people, and from which they derive food and clothing in abundance. My Children, some of you whom I now address are old and wise men, who have lived long enough to see that the kind of life you lead is neither productive of happiness to yourselves, nor acceptable to the Great Spirit. You know the constant state of warfare in which you have lived has reduced some of your most powerful nations to a mere handful; and even in time of peace, the difficulty of procuring provisions at some seasons of the year is so great, that your women are unable to raise a sufficient number of children to supply the constant waste occasioned by the excessive use of that most pernicious liquor, whiskey. My Children, the Great Spirit must assuredly have been angry with us when he discovered to man the mode of making