Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/287

Rh varied spirit. The ruthlessness and inhumanity and grasping greed of those who came only for gold and conquest, whose rushing mail-clad and mounted warriors spread a panic terror among the natives, had prepared the red man to expect only aggravations of cruelty and outrage from each reinforcement of the invaders. Happily in some respects for our aborigines, their first European visitors, the Spaniards, exhausted upon them the possibilities of a wild and desperate fury, without one relieving element of pity or the incidental transfer to the natives of a single blessing of civilization.

But whatever of mitigation in the ferocity and cruelty of invaders the natives here might have noted in the French, as compared with their Spanish visitors, must have been of slight relief to them when they came to realize that, while they themselves and their wild domains were to be the common spoil of the mysterious adventurers, the spoil at stake would find them embroiled with the quarrels of the rivals. Matter of speculation might be found in raising the question whether it would have fared better or worse for the natives had only a single one of the European nationalities at the time maintained the exclusive right of commerce, conquest, and occupancy on the new continent. It is conceivable, though hardly probable, that if the Spaniards had for even a century been permitted to hold and improve the sole territorial right here which the bull of the Pope conferred upon their sovereign, they might even have found it for their advantage to have conciliated the natives, to have put them to some other use than slaughter or even slavery, and to have established with them relations of mutual service. It was not, however, the temper or the aim of the chivalric age of Spain to seek for any work of peaceful colonization.

The enterprises of French adventurers and colonists which brought them into contact with our natives began, with a considerable interval of time between them, on both