at, or harder to trick
into civility, or more impervious to the injunctions of the Ten
Commandments? I suppose it will be said that he is; that the black
fellow bolted the whole code at a gobble, and wagged his tail, as if the
feat must surely please his new masters; that he had long had the
benefit of civilized cooking, and knew a gentleman by his toggery; that,
moreover, he was of a teachable, plastic nature, and was meant to lie
down in due time upon the hearth rug before the fire, in any gentleman's
sitting room in the land. It may be true. I believe all this myself, and
a good deal more, about him; and I take renewed hope also for this great
republic--which is the hope of the world!--that it has thus, at last,
tamed him, and fitted him for exhibition upon a nobler theatre than that
of Barnum.

But the red lion, you say, is untamable--cannot be dealt with
successfully by the wit of white men; and that it is best, therefore, to
rob him of the golden apples which he guards, and which are his only
food, and so starve him out. But you can't deal that way with the Indian
lion, my friend, without feeling the taste of his claws. You have tried
it long enough. Bishop Whipple says, 'for fifty years'! And I ask you
how much nearer are you to the taming of him now, than you were those
'fifty years' ago? Echo answers: 'That's an impudent question!' and I
reply, so be it! but you can't shuffle it off in that way. I have tried
my hand at suggesting how imminent dangers, calamities, and horrors may
even yet be averted from the Western settlements; and if those who urge
that justice shall be done to them, equal to that which we here render,
or try or pretend to render to each other--if those who urge this are
not listened to now, their plea will be remembered when it is all too
late, and thousands of innocent people are again murdered, and their
homes laid waste and desolate.

I again say, let no one think by these statements that I am making a
special pleading for the Indians, or that I sanction their butcheries.
God knows how far all this is from my thought or feeling! I am a white
man right through all the inmost fibres of my being: too white, I often
fear; for I find my love of race, and pride of blood and ancestry, often
encroach too far upon the proper regions of my humanity, and threaten to
blear my eyesight to the fair claims of the inferior races.

But I have to do with a thoughtful, reflective, and, at the bottom, just