Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/50

30 Those who have most fondly painted this ideal of what might have been the relations between the two races on this continent, will even suggest what they regard as approximations to it in the peaceful connections, with results of a common prosperity, which have existed between colonists here from over the whole globe, with all languages and religions, with unlike habits and modes of life.

It may be said that it is not yet too late to put this deferred experiment to a trial. Some proximate attempts have indeed been made to realize it, and are still in progress, — as, for instance, in reserved localities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and New York, where representatives of Indian tribes have remained in peaceful relations with the whites by covenants, as has been stated, formed far back in our Colonial and Provincial epochs. But to have made these fragmentary and special provisions a rule for general application over our whole domain, would have called for an exercise of wisdom and humanity such as has asserted itself only since harsher methods had long been in practice, and penitential compunctions for them have provoked reproaches for the past. Even as the case stands now, while the humane sentiment of the age backed by the avowed purposes of the Government, — and something better than a mere feint of sincerity in effecting them, — are engaged to substitute peaceful and helpful measures in all our relations with what remains of the aboriginal stock, we are made to realize the difficulty of the process. It is enough to say that the Indians have lost, if indeed they ever had, the power of standing as an equal party with the whites in such an amicable arrangement, and must now accept such terms as may be dictated to them.

Historical students and readers of generations now on the stage, as they turn over the early New England annals, will find their interest engaged by the antique seals, with quaint devices, which were adopted for the formal attestation of their records by the colonists of Plymouth and