Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/258

238 the heathen to death as they did the bears and wolves and panthers. The claim of possession and mastery over the heathen was avowedly understood to carry with it the obligation to civilize and Christianize them, to treat them with human kindness; and in this way, while standing to them as benefactors, to obtain their good-will and security from their hate and violence. A careful study of the primary sources of information concerning the earliest intercourse of the white and the red men, always excepting the Spanish invaders, will abundantly prove that the colonists felt and owned an obligation to the natives as human beings. But the continuance of that intercourse for a few years supplanted this obligation by the vermin theory.

This ruthless view of the natives as belonging to the wild beasts of the forest and the valleys, not having been assumed or acted upon from the first by the Europeans, was of subsequent adoption. Those who have ever since avowed it, maintained it, and resolutely and sternly put it into effect in exterminating warfare, and all who allow this view plausibility and acquiesce in it without protest, stand ready to vindicate it as certified by actual, positive experience. They say that it has been forced upon their convictions by an infinite variety and a vast amount of evidence, the result of actual trial. All purposes and efforts (they will plead) to treat Indians as other than vermin have been utterly thwarted and wasted. More than two centuries of more or less considerate scheming and working for the Indians, as tractable and improvable human beings, have been demonstrated to be failures.

Stress is laid upon this very significant affirmation, that those who were found living on this whole continent from the first coming of the whites down to this day, so far from showing among them any self-working process of improvement or development of manhood, have been steadily deteriorating; and that, on the whole, — leaving out of view the wrongs inflicted on the Indians by the whites, even