Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/482

462 held in check. Some indeed were ready to turn against them with the deadliest weapons. The General and the County Courts were compelled to act in the case by some decisive measures. A committee of the magistrates advised that the Indians should be removed from their own settlements to the close neighborhood of the seaboard English towns, — to Cambridge Plains, to Dorchester Neck, and Noddle's Island, and some to Concord and Mendon. But this proposition only exasperated the more the inhabitants of those towns, as it would but bring the dreaded scourge nearer to them. It was evident, all along, that the greater familiarity into which the whites had been drawn with the natives, in the process of their so-called civilization, only made such as were not influenced by the highest considerations of religion and true commiseration regard them with more repugnance than when they were in their wild state. The rooted race-prejudice stirred the English blood. Their occasional assumptions of equality, induced by their common Christian profession and observances, made the Indians offensive. Timid and thrifty persons dreaded the strolling or camping of a few of them in their neighborhood, as worse than gypsies. The Indians observed and felt all these things, and it is not to be wondered at that they sometimes gave the whites reason to dread their proximity.

But there was no alternative to the removal of the Indians from their settlements; and that at Natick, the most secure, and the least likely it was thought to furnish traitors, was put under treatment from the misfortunes of which it never really renewed its first prosperity. Eliot and Gookin stood resolutely and most affectionately for the championship of the objects of their care. They had no distrust, no wavering in their love. They pleaded, remonstrated, and offered themselves to be sureties for the fidelity of the wretched and cowering converts. Gookin was confronted and insulted for his conduct in the case, and even Eliot was treated by some with reproaches and