Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/252

232 laments over the grievous wrongs inflicted upon the savages, and our reproaches upon our ancestors here or upon the continuous course of our Government in its dealings with the natives, — all these complaints and censures must attach only to the process, the way, the attendant acts and methods, by which the savages have been despoiled and the whites have come into possession. Let the statement just made be strictly limited, lest it be supposed to exaggerate a plea or to prejudice it. It urges only and simply the fair judgment, that the white man's uses of this continent rightfully succeed to and displace the red man's uses of it. This is not saying, nor necessarily implying, that the white man should displace and exterminate the red man. Quite other and far less simple and well-grounded reasoning and argument and dealing with facts and principles come in, when, from standing for the fair uses of enormous portions of the earth's territory, we pass to the treatment of those who were found in occupancy of it.

It is not strange that the general and popular judgment of the inevitableness of the result — namely, the displacement of the natives of the soil — should attach the same character of necessity and fate to the means by which the result has been brought about; and should urge that every successive step and act, however harsh or cruel or ruthless, by which the savages have been pressed or crushed or slaughtered, is to be ascribed to the stern compulsion of circumstances. Of late years at least, a far more discriminating and considerate view has been taken of the object to be realized, as involving one or another method for reaching it. The conviction is now as firmly cherished through our nation at large as it ever was by the most ruthless body of the earliest colonists, that the land must be rid of savages; even the most remote regions now occupied by them must sooner or later find in them tamed and civilized inhabitants. While this conviction holds unqualified, civilization is substituted for extermination as the