Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/366

346 race instincts, and through the compulsion of circumstances, which made this struggle inevitable? If so, and if this view of the facts can be philosophically sustained, not in vindication of wrong, but in explanation of experience, then a lesson so signally assured as true in the past must furnish instruction and guidance for the future. But if all this direful rage and havoc of human passion, this goading purpose of mastery by the strong and privileged over the weak and incompetent, were merely a huge struggle of might against right, it is simple trifling to refer it to any principle rooted in the nature of things. Race prejudices have had range and opportunity sufficient to show their strength. Perhaps the world is wise and humane enough now to inquire whether they are just and right, whether they are to be yielded to or discredited.

During our whole colonial and provincial period it was the hard fate of the Indians, as we have seen, to bear the brunt of every quarrel between the rival European colonists in their jealousies and struggles for dominion and the profits of the fur-trade. No sooner had one of the rivals conciliated or established friendly relations with one or more of the tribes, than the representatives of the other rival would seek to thwart any advantage of their opponents by openly or covertly forming alliances with other tribes. Tribes which might otherwise have lived in a state of suspended animosities with each other were thus driven to take the war-path. So, too, it has happened that the whole or a portion of a tribe, or of allied tribes, in the course of a century was found in the pay and service of the French against the English; of the English against the French; of the Spaniards against the French, and of the French against the Spaniards; and then of the armies of Great Britain and our own provincial forces against the French, followed in a few years by their enlistment by Great Britain to aid her in crushing the rebellion of her own colonies.