Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/338

318 twenty years afterwards, left to us when our ties of allegiance and dependence were severed. The formidable conspiracy which that greatest of Indian chieftains, Pontiac, organized among the native tribes, at the date when the triumph of British power was established on this continent, was prompted, as he alleged, by sympathy with the French, whose supremacy he hoped to see re-established here. He said he was willing to regard the King of England as his uncle, but not as his superior or sovereign. The idea had dawned upon his master mind that the sovereignty of the wilderness rested with the red men. His intelligent casting of the horoscope of the lowering future for his race led him to seek boldly and consistently to sap the very roots of the threatening calamity for them, by advising them to be no longer dependent on the white man's goods or to cherish any lurking partiality for the white man's habits of life. The peace, the security, the old pristine heritage and prosperity of the savage depended on his reversion to, his content with, his bold defence of, his forest domain, unviolated by the intrusion of the white man, however plausible or profitable his errand. Pontiac had doubtless carefully, and with discrimination, weighed in the scale of his own calm judgment the gain and loss to his race of their intercourse with foreigners. In his view the loss predominated in sum and in particulars. He inherited the policy and the sagacity of King Philip of Pokanoket, and added to them a philosophy which was his own. We are yet to read of the methods and stages of his success in organizing a dark conspiracy among the Indians, which came only so far short of full success that it stopped with the glutting of vengeance, the English colonists quailing before its wreakings of rage.

And just here it was that England trifled with her opportunity, and intensified all the toil and peril of the end she had in view. All through the previous hundred and fifty