Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/312

292 covers the whole truth, and its explanation too, in this frank statement: “The savages did not become French, but the French became savages.”

There was a root difference, complete and characteristic in all its workings and manifestations, between the ways in which the English and the French felt towards the Indians, looked upon, and treated them. On being brought into relations either friendly or hostile with the savages, the English felt for them dislike, contempt, loathing even; and they seldom took the pains to conceal these feelings. At any rate the Indians needed not to exercise their keener penetration to become perfectly aware that their treatment by the English was characterized not only by a show and assumption of superiority, but by disdain and hauteur. There was a line which the English never allowed to be crossed, or even blurred, between them and the savage, — the line which forbade real intimacy, or any concession of familiarity on equal terms. Roger Williams and the Apostle Eliot may be said in the full sincerity of their hearts, in pity, sympathetic yearnings, and heroic, patient, devoted efforts for the redemption and welfare of the Indians, to have exceeded all Englishmen; but their own avowals are evidence that their English stomachs, as they said, loathed the habits and the viands of the savage.

It would be difficult in one single point of unlikeness or contrast to offer a more striking illustration of the variance of tastes, temperaments, scruples, and other natural proclivities distinguishing the Frenchman and the Englishman, as exhibited here more than two centuries ago, than in this matter of affiliating with or loathing the Indian. Nor did the difference lie in the fact merely that the former pitied the Indian for his heathenism and the latter did not. Both agreed in acknowledging that deplorable condition and exposure of the natives, though the Englishman's method of securing them deliverance from it, even if he thought it worth the while, was more difficult and