t we procrastinated and sought to evade the issue, and for a
time made terms and compromised with wrong. In that, when at last we
were brought face to face with the question, we did the one thing that
was right, and in tears and blood expiated our own and our fathers'
errors, the ages to come will give us no grudging and stinted praise.
Would that we were equally sure that no stain will rest upon our fame
for what shall yet be done or left undone towards the original
possessors of our soil! What is past cannot be recalled; nor has any
thing yet gone into history that need deeply dishonor us as a nation.
Posterity will judge very leniently of all that has been done in heat of
blood, in the struggle for life and for the possession of the soil by
the early Colonists; it will not greatly attribute blame that, in our
industrial and territorial expansion, and a conquest of savage nature
more rapid than is recorded of any other people, savage man has suffered
somewhat at our hands; it will not attempt nicely to apportion the
mutual injuries of the frontier, to decide which was first and which was
worst in wrong, red man or white; it will have ample consideration for
the difficulties which the government has encountered in preserving the
peace between the natives and the bold, rude pioneers of civilization.
But if, when the Indians shall have been thrown helpless upon our mercy,
surrounded and disarmed by the extension of settlement, and impoverished
by the very causes which promote our wealth and greatness, we fail to
make ample provision out of our abundance, and to apply it in all
patience and with all pains, to save alive these remnants of a once
powerful people, and reconcile them to civilization, there is much
reason to fear, that, however successfully we may excuse ourselves to
ourselves by pleading the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race,
impartial history will pronounce us recreant to a sacred duty.

FOOTNOTES:

[K] From The International Review, May, 1874.

[L] The doctrine of a _vanishing_ Indian nationality was strongly
insisted on by Mr. Justice McLean in his opinion in Worcester vs. the
State of Georgia:--

"If a tribe of Indians shall become so degraded or reduced in numbers as
to lose the power of self-government, the protection of the local law,
of necessity, must be extended over them. The point at which this
exercise of power by a State would be proper need not now be considered,
if, indeed, it be a