Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/541

Rh have been inflicted upon the natives, we shall have occasion to observe that they are to be charged to the account of what, on the side either of good or evil, we are wont to admit, that the people are stronger than the Government. Had the fact been the reverse of this, and had the Government been stronger than the people, the sum and quality of our difficulties might have been different, but perhaps not more tolerable, in another form. These considerations are in all fairness to be taken into account when we examine, whether cursorily or thoroughly, the often humiliating and often discreditable course of policy which the United States Government has pursued with the Indians as a people, or with particular tribes of them.

Neither can there be any doubt that the Indians have in many ways, as a race, — with the largest comprehension of their tribes, and with reference to the amount of general good, — received a sum of benefits from our Government and its people. And this may be affirmed without the slightest hiding from our view what they have suffered from us. It might be a question not readily disposed of if asked, whether there would have been any less actual fighting, loss of life, cruelty, and all the miseries of warfare on this continent during the last hundred years, if the whites had had no part in the strife. There never has been a Quaker or peace tribe of Indians discovered on this continent. Fighting among themselves appears always to have been a chief end of their existence. Probably their having found a common enemy in the whites has checked in some measure their habit of internecine war. War, too, with some foe, has always been, so far as we know, the foremost and engrossing passion of Indians. They were trained for it; and if they did not enjoy it, they found an intense stimulus and satisfaction in its practice. Their great men were their warriors. We have given them another enemy, but we taught them no new lesson of blood.

It is certain that the mass of Indians who have come into