Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/257

Rh wretchedness of pauperism, ignorance, and the lack of any spur in themselves to shake off their squalor and barbarism; there are none among them able and disposed to do for them what prosperous and merciful people do for the refuse of civilization.

If we thus find the root or starting-point of the white man's whole course towards the Indian to lie in the assumption or the belief that he was a part of the vermin of the soil whose removal or extinction was essential to secure the white man's unquestioned right to make waste territory habitable by civilized human beings, it is but fair that we examine the reasons or the evidence which the white man had for coming to that opinion. And fairness requires the statement that the white man did not begin his intercourse with the natives with that prejudged view of them. That opinion was not a theory to start from, — certainly not with the leading English colonists. Some of the earliest intercourse of the English more especially, but also of the French and Dutch comers here, with individual natives or with groups of them, was marked by considerate sympathy and generosity. And the whites acknowledged it as such; they recognized in it human kindness, — the response of fellow-feeling in the heart, which knits kinship independent of race. It must be urged that the whites did not from the beginning assume as a foregone conclusion that they would need to exterminate the red men utterly, as a condition of their own comfort and security. Indeed, in many very significant instances they seem to have sincerely felt and acknowledged that they had human obligations to fulfil towards the savages. It is true that all the Protestants of those times did believe, as on most sufficient and positive Scriptural authority, that Christians had a right to possess themselves of soil occupied by heathens, and to assume the mastery over heathens. But they by no means claimed or believed that it followed from this, as included in it, that they had a right to put