r Indian converts, dwelt in
Pennsylvania; but, harried and oppressed by their white neighbors, the
submissive and patient Moravians left their homes and their cherished
belongings, and in 1771 moved out into the wilderness northwest of the
Ohio. It is a bitter and unanswerable commentary on the workings of a
non-resistant creed when reduced to practice, that such outrages and
massacres as those committed on these helpless Indians were more
numerous and flagrant in the colony the Quakers governed than in any
other; their vaunted policy of peace, which forbade them to play a true
man's part and put down wrong-doing, caused the utmost possible evil to
fall both on the white man and the red. An avowed policy of force and
fraud carried out in the most cynical manner could hardly have worked
more terrible injustice; their system was a direct incentive to crime
and wrong-doing between the races, for they punished the aggressions of
neither, and hence allowed any blow to always fall heaviest on those
least deserving to suffer. No other colony made such futile,
contemptible efforts to deal with the Indian problem; no other colony
showed such supine, selfish helplessness in allowing her own border
citizens to be mercilessly harried; none other betrayed such inability
to master the hostile Indians, while, nevertheless, utterly failing to
protect those who were peaceful and friendly.

When the Moravians removed beyond the Ohio, they settled on the banks of
the Muskingum, made clearings in the forest, and built themselves little
towns, which they christened by such quaint names as Salem and
Gnadenhutten; names that were pathetic symbols of the peace which the
harmless and sadly submissive wanderers so vainly sought. Here, in the
forest, they worked and toiled, surrounded their clean, neatly kept
villages with orchards and grain-fields, bred horses and cattle, and
tried to do wrong to no man; all of each community meeting every day to
worship and praise their Creator. But the missionaries who had done so
much for them had also done one thing which more than offset it all: for
they had taught them not to defend themselves, and had thus exposed the
poor beings who trusted their teaching to certain destruction. No
greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a
bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way
can the success of evil be made surer and quicker; but the wrong was
peculiarly gre