Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/501

Rh Indians, when we recognize the fact that that Government, as a government, has never had any such relations with the savages as did our colonists, and as the United States now have. That Government, as such, never undertook and managed the work of colonization on this continent by public initiation, patronage, fostering care, and military support, as it has done in India and Australia. It put its seal to charters and to proprietary rights, but it left adventurers to their own charges; and in fact it awoke to the realization that it had American colonies only when it became aware that they had prospered so as to be available for taxation, and were too strong and independent to yield to the demand. Not in a single instance has the British Government sent over at its own cost a body of colonists to this soil. The Government, therefore, as such, has never had to meet and deal with the Indians on the same footing as did the actual colonists. Those actual colonists were English people exiled from their own homes. As they came for a permanent stay, — not as transient, wandering traders, but as agriculturists and laborers on the soil, — they were brought into intimate relations with the Indians; they had to struggle for a foothold, to secure local property, to provide steadily for an extension of their territory as their numbers increased, to conciliate or subdue bands of the aborigines, and to lay and defend the foundations of a new empire here. Then, in very early stages of their hard enterprise these English colonists, without any aid from their Government at home, had to meet their first collisions with Dutch and French rivals struggling for dominion in the New World. When these antagonistic complications had reached a stage at which Britain, having in view — which ever it might have been — whether her own jealous pride of empire or the defence of her imperilled and exhausted colonies, sent her armies and fleets with generals and admirals to crush the French, she too was forced to put herself into the same relations with the savages as her