Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/554

534 reconciled themselves to this sad fortune of the aborigines, as of destiny, in conformity with the opinion of Mr. Clay.

If it be urged that all the measures taken by our Government avowedly for the protection of the Indian tribes have invariably been conditioned upon their removal from coveted domains, farther into the West, only to be crowded yet backward when their reservations are reached, — the answer will be a prompt one in these days, when the whole history of evolved life, vegetable, animal, and human, on this globe, is read by philosophy as “a survival of the fittest.” Mr. Edward Everett, in his address at Deerfield, commemorative of the massacre at “Bloody Brook,” boldly vindicated the course of the white man towards the savages as conformed to a providential design and sanction. He urged that if the habitable spaces of this globe are to be the scenes of culture, prosperity, thrift, and happiness for communities of human beings in fields and homes, then it was right that the savages roaming over this new continent should yield it to the needs of those who could make a better use of it.

To all pleas as to the enormous and complicated perplexities with which our Government has had to deal, from its first attempts to dispose of the Indian problem, the easy reply is offered, that the problem would have been a perfectly simple and lucid one, if it had been left to the solution of natural justice and common humanity. And as a comment on this reply it is added, that abstractly and rhetorically the rights and claims of the Indians have been recognized, perhaps often in excess of just reason and extent; but that when they have stood in the way of the advances of civilization, or have conflicted with the greed and washes of the whites, — the whites being the sole judges in the case, — then the recognized rights of the red man have turned to mere mist.

There certainly has been much allowed and done that has this aspect. But we must look below this aspect. In