Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/49

Rh which would have withstood a giant injustice, and forbade countless atrocities, massacres, and wars. This conception, in the interest of right and reason and humanity, suggests that the stock and lineage of the original red men, with those of the colonizing white men, might easily have begun an amicable and helpful coexistence on this continent, and shared the heritage; and that they might, according to circumstances or their own wills, have become amalgamated, or kept themselves distinct. And the relations between the English residents and the natives in their East Indian dependencies are pointed to as affording some sort of a parallel.

By that facile method by which we often shape conditions which, as we assume, might have been and ought to have been realized, while we leave out of view the needful means for effecting them and the obstacles which interposed, we are apt to argue the case presented somewhat as follows: There was, and is, on this continent room enough for both races. The new comers were forlorn strangers, — guests. The aborigines were kindly hosts to these poor wayfarers. They might have lived peacefully together and prospered, the stronger party always keeping the grateful memory of early obligations. Left to their natural ways and development, the whites might have occupied the seaboard and the factory streams, gradually extending into the interior; the red men might have hid within the forest recesses, to conserve any of the good qualities of their race, without contamination, and gradually with the adoption of improving influences from the whites. Then all would have been fair to-day between the races. We might have had some splendid and noble specimens of the red men in our Congress, — an improvement on some who are there now. Thus would have been realized the hope and prayer of the good old Canonicus, the first and fast friend of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, “That the English and my posterity shall live in love and peace together.”