Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/529

Rh other, and to secure separate treaties with them. If the English can magnanimously claim that in pure love for the Indians they aimed to thwart this disintegrating art and cunning of ours, we might compliment them as for a commendable purpose. It is none the less true that when we are now in trouble with some of our Indians, they are well aware that they will find aid, comfort, and supplies across the border. By Jay's treaty the British on our border, where they retained the posts, were allowed to trade with the Indians, but were to pay duties on goods. This the British evaded. They gave medals of their sovereigns to the chiefs, and put up English flags at fortified posts not belonging to them. So late as 1805, Lieutenant Pike, sent by our Government on an expedition to the sources of the Mississippi, made complaint to an agent of the English Northwest Company of the grievances which we were suffering from the mischievous and illegal dealings of our neighbors, in spite of all agreements and provisions for our security.

I refer to this series of annoyances, grave or petty, not for the purpose of criminating the English, or as charging upon them the whole burden of very much of the incidental hostility into which we have been driven with our Western Indians. My statements are addressed merely to the qualification of the claim that the British have been more just and more pacific in the treatment of the savages than has our Government or its people. The circumstances of the respective parties have been quite unlike, and the occasions of animosity with the Indians have often been wholly peculiar to ourselves. If, therefore, British policy has availed for keeping its own territory or people quiet at our expense, that policy — whatever else it may have been — has hardly been a magnanimous one.

A suggestive illustration of the alleged kindly course pursued by an official Englishman towards the natives is given in “Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, by Gilbert Malcolm Sproat” (London, 1868). He writes: —