Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/301

Rh for them to ask as to the right or wrong in any case where moral distinctions were inapplicable, between tribes of wild heathens. They must make terms with their nearest neighbors, and hold their enemies common enemies. Over and over again did discomfitures and calamities, in dismal variety, threaten absolute failure of enterprises. But again and again fresh spirits — nerved by an iron resolve, and fired by greed, the love of adventure, fanaticism, and the restlessness of a fermenting age — renewed the venture. The retrospect of the fortunes of the red race, which has been yielding and fading before this persistent and lion-hearted endeavor, is prevailingly melancholy, as it presents imbecility and incapacity succumbing to the potency of skill and energy. But from the earlier enterprises of the white race on this continent, especially as represented by the French, we are made to know what there is in the reserved resources of human nature for endurance and buffeting, for persistency and patience of all hardships. This nature of ours is not susceptible only to the blandishments of ease and fulness of pleasure: it is furnished with its own armor for perils that have been courted, and for straits of experience which line the way to all consummate ambitions.

Mr. Parkman rightly tells us that “in one point Champlain's plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood, — the fiercest, the boldest, the most politic, and the most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth and nurture.”

Champlain initiated the policy which all his successors representing French dominion here felt themselves compelled to follow. With allies, some of whom wholly failed him at the time and place of concourse, and all of whom, by their turbulence, their laggardness, and incompetency of discipline, were as much a torment as a help to him, he rashly drew upon himself the rage of the Iroquois by an