Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/498

478 Referring to the unsatisfactory state of the Indian question in British Columbia, in an address which he delivered there in 1876, the Earl of Dufferin, then Governor-General of Canada said: —

I have quoted these remarks from a most honored and well-informed official of the British crown, simply as an emphatic statement of the prevailing view already referred to. I have no intention of making a special challenge of the correctness of his Lordship's assertion. Only as it conforms in letter and spirit with the terms of very many similar assertions from a large number of persons whose words have not the weight which attaches to his, do I use it as a sort of text to be commented upon with frankness, as it stands in the light of facts in the past and in the present.

Great Britain, as a government, first gained dominion here by invasion and conquest, after her colonists had independently of her patronage secured a footing on the soil. She acceded also by conquest to the territory which had been held by France, precisely as our Government afterwards did to what had been held by our mother country. At the time of each transfer from the French to the English, and from the English to the United States, the natives who had