Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/537

Rh previous to a thorough investigation as wholly warranted, I have no intention whatever of entering any other plea for reducing these reproaches than such as is furnished by a fair statement of the facts. It would indeed be painful and humiliating to be compelled to admit, that, in a country like this, strewn all over with the noble institutions of philanthropy, with hospitals for every ill of humanity, sending out funds and laborers for all other sorts of heathen, relieving local disasters by flood, fire, famine, and pestilence by the joint contributions of private benevolence; a country that has proved the asylum of the needy and oppressed from all other civilized lands; and, more than all, a country which hung itself in sackcloth, and bore every form of costly sacrifice to rid itself of slavery, — it would, I say, be hard to yield the avowal that we had, through our Government, combined — with a set purpose of inhumanity, cruelty, and fraud — against our predecessors on the soil. Not denying that there has been very much done and winked at that looks like this, I affirm that at least the intention, the purpose charged against us exceeds the range of truth.

I can say more than this; namely, that I am persuaded that every candid person who will acquaint himself to any reasonable extent with the enormous mass of our national State papers, our official documents, and our general literature on this whole subject, will find abundant evidence that our Government, from the first and always up to to-day, as well as the great mass of our people, have had the most humane feelings and the most generous intents and purposes towards the Indians. Mistakes, vexations, difficulties, and complications of all sorts and kinds, either inherent in or incident to the practical workings of the case, or arising from inconsistency or inconstancy of means and method, will in great part account for the failure of designed right and good, and the substitution of what has been wrong and calamitous. We may justly use terms severe and condemnatory in word and tone, to