Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/441

Rh nearly thirty years, the period of a generation, to pass since they had occupied the soil of Massachusetts, without undertaking the serious work. The colonists had learned enough of the Indian tongue for the purposes of trade and barter; they had made the natives feel the power and superiority of the white men, and kept them at a distance as barbarians and pagans, holding them subject to their own laws for theft, polygamy, and murder, and waging dire war against them for acts which the Indians regarded only as a defence of their natural rights; but as yet, and not till a long interval of years had passed, had the white men proposed to make the savages equal sharers in the blessings of their civilization and religion. So far as the needful efforts to this end would have required expense and any combined and systematic labor, the colonists might reasonably have explained and excused their delay by their own scanty means and the extreme difficulty they found in maintaining their own existence, and in laying, through toil and struggle and many bufferings, the foundations of their commonwealth. Incidentally, too, we must recognize the fact, that from the first all the Indians who came in contact with the English received from them help, tools, appliances, resources, and many comforts to relieve the wretchedness of their lot and life. The childlike sincerity of Eliot furnished him with a reply which best apologized for the neglect of the past by regret and by the earnestness of his purpose for the future. The Presbyterian Baylie, in his invective against the New England “Church way,” charges upon its supporters a neglect of the work of con- version. He says that they were, “of all that ever crossed the American seas, the most neglectful” of that work. The grounds of his charge rest upon quotations from Roger Williams. On his voyage to England, in the spring of 1643, Williams employed himself upon his “Key into the Language of America,” which was published in London in