Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/36

16 the soil. The Frenchman was content with the fur-trade, in pursuit of which he needed the aid of the Indian, whom he was disposed therefore to treat with friendliness, and with whom he consorted on such equal terms as to be still represented, all over our north and west, by a race of half-breeds. The staple of the English stock, after some random ventures in Virginia, when they came to be represented by the Puritan element in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, though they had fallen upon the least kindly and the most rugged soil of the continent, accepted the condition of hard work and frugal ways, earning their living by codfish and corn. And that may be the reason why — the Spaniards having vanished with the age of gold, and the French with the wasteful fur-trade — the English, though the last comers, are the hard workers and the opulent on this land.

The red men will always have a tender, touching claim upon our sympathetic regrets in the fact that we succeed to their heritage. We fill the places from which they have vanished. The more enduring, the unchangeable features of the scenes of our life-time — the mountain, the valley, the river — are those which are forever identified with them. The changes and improvements which we have introduced are wholly ours, and would be simply indifferent or offensive to the wild forest rovers. However we may palliate or justify, with reasons or from the stress of necessity, their removal from before us, we cannot forget that they were once here; and that whatever was the sum or substance of the good of existence for them was found in the same aspects of Nature, under the same sun and moon and stars, on the same soil, as the same seasons passed over it, where we find our own. An ancient burial-ground, with its decaying memorials, does not lose the pathos of its suggestiveness for us in the reflection that the covered human dust is very ancient, and was of necessity deposited there.

There are occasions and places when the regretful