Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/39

Rh the judgment which later times and loftier standards of right than our own will pronounce upon our country for our treatment of the Indians. Occasionally, with prophetic burden, the stern seer into the future denounces a curse forever to rest upon this land, evoked by the silent, spectral forms of the vanished red men over whose hunting-grounds and graves in the hands of the spoiler no permanent blessing can ever be enjoyed. But, through any and all future time, — when, if it should be so, the red race has vanished, — two very different pleas in relief or vindication of the white man will be offered. We can anticipate those pleas, for they can be no other than are spoken earnestly and urgently in our own present time. One of them will urge, as it now urges, inevitable fate, irresistible destiny, as appointing absolute extermination and extinction for a race of men either incapable of, or wilfully hostile to, civilization. The other plea of defence will rest in firmly and eloquently insisting that the wisdom and conscience of the white man were thwarted, by circumstance or inherent obstacles, in all the humane and earnest and costly work which he attempted for the good of the red man.

In the broad sweep of historic retrospect, that has indeed been a direful and tragic work as regards the red man and the white man which has been wrought on this continent; sad and shocking it is, whether we contemplate it in the interests of a humane civilization, or in sympathy with the Indian. But with no intent to prejudice the whole issue, to plead for wrong, or to palliate iniquity, there are two stern facts of which we may remind ourselves. First: during the more than three centuries of struggle between Christian and heathen races on this continent, every wrong and outrage to humanity, all the woe and suffering involved in it, have been more than matched in the methods by which so-called Christians have dealt with each other in the Old World, by wars, massacres, persecutions, and all the enginery of passion and folly, and hate and vengeance. And,