Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/145

 red hand of war has rested most heavily upon shrieking mother and wailing babe.

If from this history the Caucasian can extract any cause of self-laudation I am glad of it: speaking as a censor who has read the evidence with as much impartiality as could be expected from one who started in with the sincere conviction that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and that the only use to make of him was that of a fertilizer, and who, from studying the documents in the case, and listening little by little to the savage's own story, has arrived at the conclusion that perhaps Pope Paul III. was right when he solemnly declared that the natives of the New World had souls and must be treated as human beings, and admitted to the sacraments when found ready to receive them, I feel it to be my duty to say that the Apache has found himself in the very best of company when he committed any atrocity, it matters not how vile, and that his complete history, if it could be written by himself, would not be any special cause of self-complacency to such white men as believe in a just God, who will visit the sins of parents upon their children even to the third and the fourth generation.

We have become so thoroughly Pecksniffian in our self-laudation, in our exaltation of our own virtues, that we have become grounded in the error of imagining that the American savage is more cruel in his war customs than other nations of the earth have been; this, as I have already intimated, is a misconception, and statistics, for such as care to dig them out, will prove that I am right. The Assyrians cut their conquered foes limb from limb; the Israelites spared neither parent nor child; the Romans crucified head downward the gladiators who revolted under Spartacus; even in the civilized England of the past century, the wretch convicted of treason was executed under circumstances of cruelty which would have been too much for the nerves of the fiercest of the Apaches or Sioux. Instances in support of what I here assert crop up all over the page of history; the trouble is not to discover them, but to keep them from blinding the memory to matters more pleasant to remember. Certainly, the American aborigine is not indebted to his pale-faced brother, no matter of what nation or race he may be, for lessons in tenderness and humanity.

Premising the few remarks which I will allow myself to make