Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/616

596 efforts for him, all thwarted; and it is also said to have forced itself upon candid and disappointed minds as a substitute for quite a different hope and belief about him. Searched down to its roots, this conviction plants itself on the assertion that there is in the heredity and the organization and birth-type of an Indian, in his tissue and fibre, in his elementary make-up, in his aptitudes, limitations, disabilities, proclivities, and drift of nature, a constitution which assigns him to savagism, and bars his transformation to a civilized state. In these respects he has qualities inherent, congenital, ineradicable, answering to those respectively of stock animals in the field and wild animals in the jungle; qualities like those which are specific and distinctive between fruit and forest trees, wild shrubs and berries, which lose their flavor under cultivation. The principles and the subtlest methods of physiological science are drawn upon to illustrate and account for this congenital quality of the Indian. There goes with the black hair, the high cheek bones, the tinted skin, the germinal cell and tissue of the race, an impregnated destiny in development which perpetuates itself in all generations.

“The Indian naturally detests civilization,” is the general and emphatic statement of those who have authority to utter positive opinions on the subject. The statement may be admitted as fully warranting the belief, that, while the barbaric and savage element is predominant in an Indian, he will hate and fret against civilization.

I will begin by admitting that the Indian yields to, and has reasons for, this hostility. And we may be sure of this, too, that the better acquainted a wild Indian became with our civilization, the more he would detest it. If the Indian could learn and see and know the secrets and shadows of a civilized state, in crowded cities and close communities, the less would he feel inclined to prefer it to his own tribal forest life.

We are apt quietly to take for granted not only what is