Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/361



The Indian's side of the story, in his conflict with the white man, will never be fully told, and it need not be. Something of it is known and the rest can be predicted. An unprogressive being was he, quite well satisfied with the present, unstimulated by the past, non-apprehensive of the future, and any one can say of such a being that in contact with one in all things the reverse, a restless mortal dissatisfied with the present, with a history pointing upwards, apprehensive of the future and always striving for individual and social betterment; in other words, continually working on his environment and full of the enthusiasm of progress which coveted the earth—yes, any one can say that the former would be the victim, the one sinned against, and the latter the sinner, whatever the annals might show. As it is, however, Poor Lo must stand in history as the barbarian resisting unto death the advance of civilization. Of course, if the American aborigine persisted in his habit of depending upon the spontaneous productions of the earth for a living, he must and should go to the wall in a contest with those whose habits of contributing their labor and thought to increase the bounties of nature, put them in harmony with nature's other edict, that man should multiply and replenish the earth. The two modes of life are irreconcilably antagonistic. One is at variance with any considerable increase of population and means destruction either by war or famine to hold it in check; the other is consistent with increase of population, invites to individual effort of mind and body in utilizing the forces of nature and thus leads to civilization.

This natural and therefore inevitable antagonism, which must produce perpetual conflict even when both sides to it are governed by humane principles, was never brought home