Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/359

Rh view, in a way to vindicate Philip and his followers as altogether justifiable in their course of resistance to the white man's wrongs and outrages. These Indian advocates have cast upon our ancestral magistrates and soldiers the burden of what to us seems inhuman, and, of course, unchristian.

In the abundance and variety of the printed pages relating to the right and the wrong in Philip's war, it would hardly be worth our while to attempt another discussion of it. It is very easy to make and strengthen a plea on either side, for each had a cause and found justification for standing for it, even to the most dire extremities. It is enough to say that our sympathy, at least, goes with the barbarous victims of their own blind and dauntless effort to resist what we call their destiny; and that the weight of condemnation must come on the English for suspicions and unwise measures and actual wrongs, in the early stages of the strife. They were the intruders; they were arrogant and overbearing; they were the stronger party, and, in profession at least, held themselves more intelligently bound to justice, mercy, and righteousness. The blame, I say, is with them in the opening of the strife. But as it advanced, and in their dread consternation as it strengthened in extent and horror and success; as their frontiers were desolated, and fire, massacre, and torture came nearer and nearer to their centre, — the yell, the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, and the torch working up the nightmare of every man, woman, and child in their scattered settlements, — we can no longer interpose our scruples as to acts or apprehensions of the exasperated and almost desperate colonists. Probably we cannot overstrain the palliation we are disposed to find for the whites, alike in their opinion of the natural fiendishness of the Indian character and their horror of Indian warfare, after their first dire experience of both. White men all over this warring globe have generally suspended hostilities in the dark hours of night, if only that they might distinguish between friend and foe;