Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/539

Rh and the Gulf of Mexico, to our annoyance and grievous loss.

Third, the Spaniards on the South and in the Mississippi Valley still retained dominion over large reaches of soil, and we had from them a continuous series of vexing and disturbing controversies, with battles interspersed running down to our Mexican War.

These facts are to be considered because they prevented our starting freely and fairly in our career, as regarded our relations with the aborigines, responsible only for our own public acts and measures. By what is called the Law of Nations — though it can hardly be by the law of Nature — our Government might claim, that, as Great Britain asserted a right of sovereignty over the Indians and their territory within certain bounds on this continent, we, having conquered in the great war of Independence, acceded to that British right, and so that the Indians became our subjects, and their land ours.

But these difficulties, impairing the freedom with which we might have started in our career as an independent people, and in perfectly unprejudiced relations with the natives, are comparatively of trivial importance, when we come to recognize on the one side the inherent difficulties of the original problem, with all the remarkable development of unforeseen, incalculable, and marvellous complications which have gathered around it for a century; and, on the other, that our Government started in its dealing with the subject without any well-considered plan, principle, policy, or even theory: so that its course has been one of surprises, of hap-hazards, of temporary makeshifts, of adjustments to changing circumstances, of pledges given and broken, of evasions of some obligations by assuming others more burdensome, and indeed of those unhappy faults of blundering which, though they are said to be worse than crimes, lack the quality of intention. Our Government never has adopted or given the sanction of