Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/19

6 Fundy and Lake Superior; they lodged in the same tent, slept on the same bear-skin; nay, they knelt together before the same God, who was "no respecter of persons," and had made of one blood all nations of men! The white man married the Indian's daughter; the red man wooed and won the pale child of the Caucasian. This took place in Canada, and in Mexico, in Peru, and Equador. In Brazil, the negro graduates at the college; he becomes a general in the army. But the Anglo-Saxon disdains to mingle his proud blood in wedlock with the "inferior races of men." He puts away the savage—black, yellow, red. In New England, the Puritan converted the Indians to Christianity, as far as they could accept the theology of John Calvin ; but made a careful separation between white and red, "my people and thy people." They must dwell in separate villages, worship in separate houses; they must not intermarry. The general court of Massachusetts once forbade all extra-matrimonial connection of white and red, on pain of death! The Anglo-Saxon has carefully sought to exterminate the savages from his territory. The Briton does so in Africa, in Van Diemen's Land, in New Zealand, in New Holland—wherever he meets them. The American does the same in the western world. In New England the Puritan found the wild woods, the wild beasts, and the wild men; he undertook to eradicate them all, and has succeeded best with the wild men. There are more bears than Indians in New England. The United States pursues the same destructive policy. In two hundred years more there wiU be few Indians left between the Lake of the "Woods and the Gulf of Mexico, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Yet the Anglo-Saxons are not cruel ; they are simply destructive. The Dutch, in New York, perpetrated the most wanton. cruelties: the savages themselves shuddered at the white man's atrocity: "Our gods would be offended at such things," said they ; *^ the white man's God must be different !" The cruelties of the French, and, still more, of the Spaniards in Mexico, in the West Indies, and South America, are too terrible to repeat, but too well known to need relating. The Spaniard put men to death with refinements of cruelty, luxuriating in destructiveness. The Anglo-Saxon simply shot down his foe, offered a