h due reverence,) I ask,
what people could improve under laws which gave such temptation and
facility to plunder? I think such experiments as our government have
made ought to be seldom tried.

If the government of Massachusetts do not see fit to believe me, I
would fain propose to them a test of the soundness of my reasoning.
Let them put our white neighbors in Barnstable County under the
guardianship of a Board of Overseers, and give them no privileges
other than have been allowed to the poor, despised Indians. Let them
inflict upon the said whites a preacher whom they neither love nor
respect, and do not wish to hear. Let them, in short, be treated
just as the Marshpee tribe have been, I think there will soon be a
declension of morals and population. We shall see if they will be able
to build up a town in such circumstances. Any enterprising men who may
be among them will soon seek another home and society, which it is not
in the power of the Indians to do, on account of their color. Could
they have been received and treated by the world as other people are,
there would not be so many living in Marshpee as there are by half.

The laws were calculated to drive the tribe from their possessions,
and annihilate them, as a people; and I presume they would work the
same effect upon any other people; for human nature is the same under
skins of all colors. Degradation is degradation, all the world over.

If the white man desired the welfare of his red brethren, why did he
not give them schools? Why has not the State done something to supply
us with teachers and places of instruction? I trow, all the schooling
the Marshpee people have ever had, they have gotten themselves. There
was not even a house on the plantation for the accommodation of a
teacher, till I arrived among them. We have now a house respectable
enough for even a white teacher to lodge in comfortably, and we are in
strong hopes that we shall one day soon be able to provide for our own
wants, if the whites will only permit us to do so, as they never have
done yet. If they can but be convinced that we are human beings, I
trust they will be our hindrance no longer.

I beg the reader's patience and attention to a few general remarks. It
is a sorrowful truth that, heretofore, all legislation regarding the
affairs of Indians, has had a direct tendency to degrade them, to
drive them from their homes, and the graves of their fathers, and
to give their lands as a sp