Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/610

590 the camel, the dog, the elephant, and the domestic fowls yield to our will. We try our skill also on flowers, fruits, vegetables, and berries. As nations become powerful and learn to course the seas, they spy out the people of countries, continents, and islands, who, having long been left to themselves, have fallen into ways of their own. Then they assume the right “to open” (as they say) those countries and people to the daylight, to bring them into the comity of nations, to compel them into intercourse and commerce. So India, China, and Japan have been “opened,” and made to open their ports, to enter into consular arrangements, exchange commodities, etc. We quietly assume that if such places and people are civilized at all, their civilization is of a lower grade than ours. They do not invite us, nor welcome us. So much the worse for them. Do you wish to be civilized? Are you willing to be civilized? — are questions which civilized courtesy might prompt; but they are generally overlooked, and no alternative is allowed. And here would naturally come in a question which to some persons seems a very simple one: Why, on the broad and ample fields of this continent, whose larger expanses are still in a wild state, have not the red man and the white man consented to keep apart, leaving each other alone, each to his own preferred way of life? Why these three centuries of warfare, this pushing and resisting, these endless collisions, waking the echoes of mountain and valley with the enginery of battle, crimsoning every water-flow with blood, and strewing forest and plain with the bleaching bones of the unburied dead? The only answer to be given is, that civilization has the restlessness and working energy of leaven. Over and over again has the Indian, alike in peaceful council and in the barbarities of his warfare, asked the white man, “Why will you not leave us to ourselves? The Great Spirit once divided us by the ocean; having crossed that, nothing stops your pathway.” Yet we press and crowd them; it is the