Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/502

482 had maintained, — making alliance with some of them, and visiting the scourge of war on others. We shall have occasion to note how she treated the Indians. Again, when Britain sought to crush the spirit of independence among her colonists, and in the second war to tyrannize over the young republic, she again put herself into relations with the savages, — whether more just than ours we shall see.

The simple truth is, we have been resident and extending colonists from the beginning, mostly from British stock. Britain, in her presence and power here, has been only an intermittent visitor, appearing on the scene in arms. As is soon to be stated, the chief relations of Britain with our savages have been for ends quite other than colonization, — ends inconsistent with colonization; and so her position towards the savages has been quite unlike that of the early colonists and their representatives here in our country. The British Empire in North America is much larger in area to-day than that of our own Government. We have an area of 3,026,094 square miles. British America has an area of 3,620,500; that is, Great Britain's domain exceeds our own here by more than half a million of square miles. Nineteen twentieths of her domain is the same old unsettled wilderness that it ever was; but our own people seem already crowded for room. The Northwest Territory of Great Britain is nearly as extensive as our whole domain. Formerly belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, whose charter expired in 1863, it passed to the Crown nearly three millions of square miles of territory, with a population almost wholly of Indians, of which there are 85,000. Had the work of colonization here by Great Britain been as brisk and vigorous as that of her own American offspring, we should have seen lively times on the north and northwest of this continent. As it is, from the acknowledgment of our independence to this day, whenever we have had border troubles with the savages, they