Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/47

Rh into intercourse with them. Closer acquaintanceship, intimacy of intercourse, and indeed the results of the first friendly and helpful efforts of the whites, soon raised and strengthened a feeling of discouragement, which was very ready to justify itself when alienation and open hostility embittered the relations of the races. The conviction that it was very difficult to convert and civilize an Indian received from most of those who listened to its avowal the response that the labor was by no means compensated by the result. In other words, the strong persuasion was that the Indian was not worth converting. This was so manifestly allowed in the case of reprobates among the whites, as to sound like an axiom when said of the red men.

“Men without knowledge of God or use of reason,” is the royal description given of the Indians by Francis, in his commission to Roberval. The monarch does not appear to have been aware of the hopelessness of any effort to deal with those who in seeming only were men, while they lacked the endowment which distinguishes man from the brute. He might, however, have qualified his description of the Indian by affirming that it was the use, not the possession or the capacity, of reason which was wanting. Had he known some of those whom he thus described; had he been left to their guidance in the lakes and streams, the thickets and coverts of the wilderness, and noted their fertility of resource, their ingenuity in emergencies, and the skill with which they interpreted Nature, — he would have found at least that they had compensating faculties as well adapted to the conditions of their life as are the trained intellectual exercises of the masses of ordinary men. That monarch and his successors were well represented among the natives by those, whether priests or adventurers and traders, to whom we owe the best knowledge of the aborigines, in the early years of intercourse. The lack of reason, or even of its use, was not the special defect of an Indian in the view of a Frenchman.