Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/325

Rh name of light and civilisation, and the “people of the twilight” give way before him, dying away by degrees in the wilderness, and in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains. It cannot be otherwise.

And whatever interest I may feel in high-minded characters among the Indians, still I cannot possibly wish for a prolonged existence to that people, who reckon cruelty among their virtues, and who reduce the weak to beasts of burden.

The people who subject them, and who deprive them of their native land, are—whatever faults they may have—a nobler and more humane people. They have a higher consciousness of good and evil. They seek after perfection; they wish to cast aside the weapons of barbarism, and not to establish on the new earth any other abiding fortress than that of the Church of Christ, and not to bear any other banner than that of the Prince of Peace. And in latter times especially have they proved, even in their transactions with the Indians, that they are earnest in this desire.

The Indians, like the Greenlanders, look down upon the white race with a proud contempt, at the same time that they fear them; and their legend of what happened at the creation of the various races, proves naïvely how they view the relationship between them.

“The first man which Manitou baked,” say they, “was not thoroughly done, and he came white out of the oven; the second was overdone, was burned in the baking, and he was black. Manitou now tried a third time, and with much better success; this third man was thoroughly baked, and came out of the oven of a fine red-brown,—this was the Indian.”

The learned of Europe divide the three principal races of the earth into People of the Day—the Whites; People of the Night—the Negroes; and People of the Twilight—the Indians of the Eastern and Western hemispheres.