Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/244

224 territory, were necessarily met here; and the way in which the whites viewed claims founded on those assumed rights, presents the other side of the problem. As we have already seen, some of the Europeans — the Spaniards — utterly despised such rights, never giving the least heed or deference to them; others of the Europeans — the French — did not find it necessary for their purposes to bring them under controversy or discussion. Either of these two courses might be pronounced as consistent as they were convenient, in averting all complications of argument or arbitration. But the English colonists, as we shall see, did not follow the example either of the Spaniards or the French. They adopted views and pursued courses distinctively their own as to the recognition of and dealing with the assumed rights of the savages on this wild territory. Their way of dealing with the matter, if not their opinions about it, was not consistent, but vacillating and variable, adjusting itself to circumstances. And this inconsistent course, adopted from the first by the English, has run down through our whole history, and is really at the root of the worst perplexities and embarrassments entailed upon our Government in its dealings with the Indians. The inconsistency was in admitting certain natural rights of the natives without defining them, and then trifling with them by a vacillating policy.

The claim of the disciples of the Roman Church was, as we have seen, absolute in this matter; and, practically, the course pursued by the Protestants — though they would have pleaded that they were driven to it by stress of circumstances in their self-defence — at first proceeded upon the assumption of the same claim, though it was soon modified. When Francis I. of France had reminded himself that, if Adam had made a will, a portion of the New World which the Pope had given over in a lump to the monarchs of Spain and Portugal would have fallen to him, he determined to act on the reasonable supposition and to