Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/478

458 trying to subsist on the produce of the soil, with occasional hunting and fishing, on wages paid them by the English for labor, and on the profit of some simple employments in handicraft. The first seven of these villages had their forts, their outlying fields, fenced or walled, their more cleanly and decent cabins, their blacksmiths, their meeting-houses, native preachers, teachers, and petty magistrates, and their administration of local affairs, with occasional help from the whites. Fruit-trees and growing crops gave a show of thrift and culture to the scenes. The Indians were kept under a jealous and rigid Puritan oversight, which could not but have been irritating, even if necessary in restraining them. It might be said that no scheme or effort, in its device or conduct, undertaken by Europeans for the Christian civilization of the natives of this soil, and indeed that no missionary enterprise among pagans in any part of the earth, was ever more sincerely attempted, or pursued with more practical wisdom and with more reasonable grounds for a rightful success, than this. Yet even with this experiment in full view, without the discomfiture brought upon it, a general and sweeping conclusion might with something more than mere plausibility be drawn, that the Indians cannot be civilized by the agency of the white man instigating and co-operating with them. Inherent and insurmountable obstacles from the blood and fibre, the instincts and temperament, — the nature, so to speak, — of the red race withstand all such efforts. As well essay, it may be said, to expel the game-flavor from the deer or the sea-fowl. Eliot and Gookin had to realize, from the first and increasingly, the distrust, the antipathy, and even the firm-set opposition, of their own countrymen to the work they were performing. And these feelings were by no means to be ascribed in all cases to unworthy or even unchristian motives. The Indians were said to have in view “the loaves and fishes,” to be untamable, and in fact likely, as hypocrites or weaklings or dependent and