Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/38

18 on, is the inquiry as to the range and degree of what we call mental development among savages generally, or in any particular portion of them favored by condition and opportunity. On the whole it may he said that fuller observation, closer intercourse, and a keener study of them have greatly qualified the first impressions and the first judgments of them as wholly imbruted, stolid, vacant in mind, inert, without food and exercise of thought. The very closeness of their relation to Nature, its aspects and products, and the acuteness of their powers of observation, must have quickened them into simple philosophers.

It is on record, and there it must remain, that to the first comers from Europe, at every point of our mainland, and islands, the natives extended a kindly and gentle welcome. They offered freely the hospitality of the woods. Yet more: they looked on the whites with timid reverence and awe as superior beings, coming not so much from another region of this same earth as from some higher realm. It is to be confessed, moreover, that their visitors very soon broke the spell of their enchantment, and proved themselves human, with charms and potencies for working harm and woe. The white men cheaply parted with the marvel and glory with which the simple natives invested them, and became the objects of a dread which was simply horror. Relations of hostility and rancor were at once established, in a superlative degree, by the Spaniards, in their ruthless raids upon the natives, to whom they made the basest returns for an overflow of kindness, whom they tasked and transported as slaves, and on whom they visited all the contempt of their own superstition and all the ingenuities of torture. The expresses and the telegraphs of the children of the woods transmitted through the continent, as effectively as do our modern devices, the mingled impressions of bewilderment and rage, and opened the since unvaried and intensified distrust which the red man has of the white man.

We are often, sometimes very solemnly, forewarned of