Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/614

594 of the change in their habits which we require of them. Yet, while we admit that free-will, desire, and effort are essential on their part to their accepting civilized ways, we must not go so far as to consent to dispense on our part with the use of constraint and force. The natural propensity of an Indian is to make himself more and more an Indian. He eats raw and bloody meat and entrails to stimulate his ferocity. He tortures himself, that he may enforce his daring and his power of enduring inflicted torture. He boasts and raves at the council-fire of his brutal and fiendish exploits. There are remnants of the six savage tribes which for nearly two hundred years, in the very heart of the State of New York, have preserved all the wild and heathen traits of their race, in spite of a considerable modification of nature among a part of them.

In the course of remark which is now to be followed let it be understood and allowed for at the start, that there are humane and hopeful friends of the Indians, philanthropists, earnest advocates of the peace policy towards them, who strongly dissent from the views and the conclusions to be stated here, frankly even if offensively, as those of the vast majority among us. The dissent of the minority from these generally prevailing views and conclusions, and the grounds of the dissent shall not fail of recognition by-and-by. Doubtless there will be those who will object to having set before them what they will pronounce to be the cruel and hateful judgment of inhuman persons who foredoom the Indians to extinction. But this aversion will indicate ignorance and prejudice, which do not desire real information as to opinions actually held by others.

If I am competent to infer from the mass of what I have read, the consenting opinion and judgment of the very large majority of men of actual knowledge and practical experience of the mature Indians is that they cannot be civilized, — that the race must perish either by violence or decay. The final catastrophe, it is said, has been forecast,