Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/236

216 are reasonable grounds for the belief, that, when the Europeans arrived, there were no vast multitudes of natives here, and that they could not have appropriated the whole continent.

The statement may be strongly emphasized, that, from the first entrance of the white man on this continent, the condition in which the natives were found, and the relations in which they stood to each other furnished every facility for their conquest and dispossession of the soil, and indeed even solicited and tempted the new comers to assume over them the tyranny of superiors. In discussing under the broadest terms the responsibility of the Europeans, coming hither either as conquerors or as peaceful settlers, for their treatment of the red men, the statement just made opens many important suggestions which are to be candidly considered. It may be affirmed in very positive terms, that if the natives had been in a state of peace, of union and harmony among themselves, and had with one purpose fronted the early European adventurers, giving them no aid and comfort, and resisting their first feeble, forlorn, and impoverished encroachments, both conquest and colonization on this soil would have been long deferred, and when finally accomplished would have been accompanied by very different circumstances, conditions, and results. Europeans, conquerors and colonists, of each nationality, — Spanish, French, Dutch, and English, — found their opportunity and their facility in the intestine strifes and the savage hostilities of the natives. The new comers in every case were able to find, and at once availed themselves of, Indian alliances against Indians. Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru would inevitably have been cut off, starved, and disabled in their schemes but for the fortuity of circumstances which gave them strong native alliances with rival chieftains, with rebels, or with the whole or portions of tribes smarting under the wild or tyrannical sway of their native despots. To each single