Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/40

20 second: if all the losses and inflictions — in pain, in actual visitations of every sort of distress and agony — could be summed up and brought into comparison, it would be found that the cost of getting possession of this continent has been and will yet be to the whites more exacting in toil and blood and in purchase-price than the defence of their heritage has been to the Indians. Sad and harrowing as has been the sanguinary conflict between a civilized and a barbarous race on this continent, how trivial has been the sum of its woes compared with those of contemporaneous passions on the other side of the ocean, in religious, civil, and dynastic wars, — wars of succession, seven years' wars, thirty years' wars, wars of the Netherlands, of the Fronde, of the League, of the Peninsula, of the Napoleons, of the Holy Alliance, of every European nation, — all Christian!

Yet if full vengeance settles the account of the wronged, vastly more in number of the whites than of the Indians, and by sterner and ghastlier methods of death, have fallen in the conflict. Nor has Christian civilization, in its restraints upon the exercise of arbitrary and vengeful power by the strong against the weak, withstood, down to our own times, the grossest acts of oppression and outrage when national or commercial aggrandizement or thrift was the object in view. When all the naval and military power and policy of Great Britain have been engaged to thrust opium down the throats of the Chinese at the point of the bayonet, and Sepoys have been blown from the mouth of cannon, we cannot deal with like enormities as stains upon merely the annals of the past.

The relations between the red and the white men on this continent, from their very first contact to this present year, may be traced historically in two parallel lines, reproducing, repeating, and illustrating in a long series the same facts which characterize each of them. First, we have in a continuous line a long series of avowed intentions, of sincere purposes, and of earnest, often heroic, designs, plans, and