Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/256

236 as if they were beasts and not men. And, of course, those who thus protest and denounce do not fail to affirm that it is the white man's treatment of the Indian that has infuriated him, and made him act like a tearing beast in his torture and rage; and that in fact the white man has proved the wilder beast of the two.

If it should be regarded as worth the while of any two earnest disputants, the one standing for and the other challenging the course pursued towards the aborigines on the ground of their being noxious and pestilent nuisances on the soil, the philanthropical pleader could hardly fail to intimate a suggestion something like the following: that in every great city of Christendom there are proportionately to the population of each of them more men, women, and children in the slums and drains of vile filth, desperate incompetency, wretchedness, vice, and destitution than there are of the original native race on this continent; that we do not deny to the most degraded and worthless of these wretches some harborage and dole of pity, nor the right to live out their days in their own fashion; but that on the contrary we assume the burden and protection of them at our own cost. And why, it would be asked by the philanthropist, might not the same course pursued towards the human vermin of the wilderness be taken with these vermin of cities, — the Indian having at least the one advantage of being ventilated by the free air?

The only answer that seems to offer itself to this question is, that the comparison between the nature and the state of the Indians and the condition of the most wretched classes in cities is not wholly one of likeness, but yields a marked difference. The vilest classes in the cities are the outgrowth, the refuse, the deposit, the residuum of civilization, and so deserve the care and pity of those who enjoy its full blessings; while the Indians oppose a fresh, resisting force to the very beginnings of civilization. They are all merged and overshadowed by the disabilities and