Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/375

Rh are identical in barbarousness with those once near our seaboard, and those once on the borders of the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley. The red race is unchanged in its specimen examples and in its staple, save as to the adoption by some of them of the white man's weapons and goods. In the mean time the characteristics, the habits, the feelings and sentiments of the white race have been modified even as regards the attitude assumed towards the Indians. No body of the whites now, holding relatively the same social and moral position as the stock of our first colonists, would maintain that the Indians are to be exterminated or denied the rights of humanity because they are heathens or because they are savages. Their claim to territory and to generous treatment is more frankly and emphatically recognized to-day than ever before; and this because of the white man's advance in humanity.

It is noticeable that the spirit of humane philanthropy, of leniency and sympathy as regards the Indians and their treatment, has been and is to-day exceedingly variable, not so much among classes of our people as in the places where they happen to live. The farther any community is in space, or in the dates of its history, from actual experience of Indian conflicts, the more kindly will the people in it be towards the savages in general; commiserating them, and advising their patient and forbearing treatment. Scarce one single loud breathing of pity or sympathy would have been indulged in our own neighborhood two hundred or more than one hundred years ago. Those whose eyes had beheld, or whose household memories and fresh traditions kept alive, the scenes of devastation, burning, and butchery in the New England settlements in King Philip's war would with scarce an exception have avowed, that absolute extinction, without mercy in the method, was the necessary and the rightful doom of the savage. Much the same, scarcely softened, would have been the judgment of our