Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/650

630 three years. Lewis Morgan naturalized himself as an Iroquois in order to study the social structure of that people. Parkman qualified himself to be the historian of the same dying race by the rough initiation of actual residence, and the story of miscegenation that he tells seems to borrow some of its fascination from observation at close quarters. There were remains of it when he wrote (in 1851), but its flourishing days belong to a full century earlier. Then the French immigrants gave prophetic confirmation of Bismarck's mot, "Scratch a Frenchman, and you come upon the red Indian." Red Indians they became. "The manners of savages" wrote one of them, are perfectly agreeable to my palate." They were adopted members of Indian tribes, had squaws and reared a dusky brood, decorated and painted, danced, hunted, and took scalps; even Count Frontenac, Governor of Canada, plumed and painted, danced and yelled. Naturally, they sank to the moral level of their associates, caught their habits, imbibed their prejudices, drank in their superstitions. Frontenac burned Iroquois prisoners; Lovigny tortured Iroquois ambassadors to death. More tragical still, the fugitives from civilization, or those who had been captured by Indians, when found and brought back, sat sullen and angry, and escaped when they could to the free forest life. Women who had been carried off from New England villages in childhood were recovered and fêted, but soon fled to their warriors and Indian children. When we condemn the savages who have reverted to their old life after being inured to civilized ways we forget the hundreds of whites who have made a far greater drop. The deterioration resembles that of horses, cattle, and other domesticated animals that have been turned adrift or broken loose in a wild country. Its degree differs in different races. The instinctive repugnance which makes it so hard for an Englishman to govern sympathetically any race but his own is here his safeguard. He intermarries or worse, but does not so greatly sink. He either disentangles himself or raises his partner to his own level. His household then becomes a normal English home.

As the savage eats the heart of his slain enemy to acquire his courage, have we miscegenated the lower races unto ourselves to gain something of the unique qualities they possess? It is impossible that the infiltration of their blood into that of a colony, weeded out as it soon is, should not proportionately affect the sentiments, beliefs, and actions of the young community. There are even writers who maintain that there can be no real interracial influence without inter-mixture. What part has the alien element played in deeply Indianized Lower Canada? How much of his genius does the naturalist, psychologist, and novelist with whom Canada dowered England owe to the strain of Indian blood in him? The Spanish-American,