Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/477

Rh we have since acquired by actual trial of similar experiments. Some new phases and complications of the problem of the co-existence of two races on different levels of intelligence, ability, and thrift, — living in immediate proximity, the inferior overborne by the superior, — would have offered more intricate issues for our politics and more puzzling perplexities for our philanthropists. The calamitous occurrences soon to be referred to, which violently arrested the working of the experiment and brought most grievous disappointment to Eliot, while entailing bitter inflictions on the Christian Indians, will be regarded by different persons according to their varying judgments, as either merely precipitating a foregone conclusion or thwarting a prospect of fair promise. Mr. Gookin, the earnest and self-sacrificing English magistrate charged with the oversight of the Indian towns, wrote his carefully prepared account of them for the Society in England, in 1674, though the manuscript was first put into print by the Massachusetts Historical Society not until 1792. His account of the progress of the experiment up to the date of his writing represented the prospect as prevailingly fair and hopeful. He himself had labored jointly with Eliot, with so much zeal and patience, and with such an unselfish and devout spirit, that he had attained a full knowledge and appreciation of all the exactions and embarrassments of the enterprise. While himself cheerful and assured, he was not over-sanguine, still less enthusiastic. He was always cautious, moderate, and discreet, recognizing alike the serious difficulties of the undertaking from the rude material with which he had to deal, and from the distrust and lack of sympathy of many of the English. He counted seven tolerably well established settlements or villages of the more or less Christianized Indians, and seven others in a crude state working towards that condition. The former were occupied substantially by natives who, with some exceptions in each, had abandoned a vagabond life, and were