Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/349

Rh dominion for herself. At any rate the colonists thought they had borne their full share of the expense in life and treasure.

We turn now to the earlier colonial relations with the savages.

There are some general statements applicable to all the original settlements made by Europeans on our present domain; excepting always those invading raids of the Spaniards, which can hardly be classed under the designation of settlements.

In the first place, it may be said with equal truth alike of the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Swedish adventurers who came hither with a view to the permanent occupancy of American soil, — for tillage, traffic, and commerce, — that they had in mind no purpose of conquest, or of taking possession by violence, through war with the savages, or by driving them clear of the territory. Not a hint or intimation, I think, can be found in any of the primary sources of our earliest colonial history that the colonists in either settlement felt before their coming that they would have to fight for a foothold, or even contemplated the necessity of so doing. Of course they were wholly ignorant of the numbers and the strength of the native tribes. But they seem to have taken for granted the sufficiency of free wild space for themselves and the natives to live in amity. Doubtless, too, they felt sure that the barbarians would welcome them as bringing with them the blessings of civilization, the tools and implements, the food, the seed, the clothing, the habits, the redeemed humanity, which the savages would be so ready to accept with an overflowing gratitude as a substitute for their rude resources and their benighted, bewildered, and dismal way of life. But in the last resort, knowing themselves to be of a nobler stock than the red men, privileged too with a higher intelligence, and above all armed with deadly weapons in comparison with which the bows and the stone hatchets of the Indians were