Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/254

234 the whole subject before us. Substantially the same course which the white men first pursued towards the natives, when in feeble companies of way-worn adventurers and colonists they invaded the soil, has followed on step by step, as a mighty nation, swarming to half a hundred millions, with all its increase of power and humanity, has pushed its frontiers into savage domains steadily and as resistless as the flow of its own river torrents.

To revert to the point first stated, — the right of civilized man to succeed to wild territory occupied by savages, — deferring for the present the subject of the treatment of its occupants. We admit the right of human beings on occupying wild territory to exterminate all noxious vermin and wild beasts, to cut down forests, to dam streams, and to do everything else on and with the soil to make it secure and habitable. An arresting scruple comes in when this right is inferred to include or to justify the allowance that a more civilized or powerful body of new comers may trample upon, drive off, or subjugate an inferior race occupying the territory. Now practically, with a fair, frank avowal, we may as well make short work of all ingenious pleadings and subterfuges here, and speak right out the historic fact, — the fact of to-day, — that the white man made a logical syllogism which connected his right to improve the soil with his way of treating the Indians; namely, he satisfied himself that the savages were a part of the vermin and wild beasts which he was justified in removing, and compelled to remove, before the territory would serve its use. However wide off from this view any of the early colonists here may have been, no candid person can deny that the view steadily came to fill the eye and mind of those whom we should have thought would have been most shocked by it.

From the first European occupancy of this continent up to these recent years when it has been sternly rebuked, the basis, the real root, of every assumption and