Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/440

420 and conversions, according to the Puritan standard. There are several English families which have Indians for servants and laborers. Many of these enjoy an attendance on “the Word,” religious and Bible lessons, family prayers, grace at meals, etc., and offer evidence of being really reached by compunctions of sin, and good hopes. Their sagamores had welcomed the whites, and mutual courtesies had passed between them. Rights in land had been fairly purchased, and no trespasses were allowed.

But, — and here comes in full recognition the characteristic disgust of the English for the Indians, which the French seem never to have felt or else cautiously suppressed, — the authors of this pamphlet arrest themselves while most complacent in their account of the Indians, thus: “Yet (mistake us not) we are wont to keep them at such a distance (knowing they serve the Devil and are led by him) as not to embolden them too much, or trust them too far; though we do them what good we can.” “No real intentions of evil against us” have been seen in any of them, “excepting that act of the Pequots. . . And if there should be such intentions, and that they all should combine together against us, with all their strength that they could raise, we see no probable ground at all to fear any hurt from them, they being naked men and the number of them that be amongst us not considerable.”

In the charter patents of all the New England colonies, in the directions and instructions issued to their magistrates, and in the professions of their leading officials, the Christianizing of the native savages of the continent held, as we have seen, a very prominent place. They were to be treated justly and kindly, to be converted to and by the gospel, and to be civilized. When John Eliot and Thomas Mayhew simultaneously first set about an efficient effort to fulfil these obligations and avowals, some of the most inquisitive of the natives put to them the natural but embarrassing question, why the English should have allowed