th that
cunning, grasping, bestial ferocity which has spread terror through the
earth during the past five centuries.

In the early years, when the whites were few and the Indians many, the
whites satisfied themselves by debauching the red men with whiskey and
bribing them with baubles and trinkets. At the same time they made
offensive and defensive alliances with them. The Spanish in the South;
the French in the North and the English between, leagued themselves with
the various tribes, supplied them with gunpowder and turned them into
mercenaries who fought for hire. Heretofore the Indian had been a free
man, fighting his wars and feuds as free men have done time out of mind.
The whites hired him as a professional soldier and by putting bounties
on scalps, plying the Indians with whiskey and inciting them by every
known device, they converted them into demons.

There is no evidence to show that up to the advent of the white men the
Indian tribes did any more fighting among themselves than the nobles of
Germany, the city states of Italy or the other inhabitants of western
Europe. Indeed there has recently been published a complete translation
of the "Constitution of the Five Nations," a league to enforce peace
which the Indians organized about the year 1390, A. D.[11] This league
which had as its object the establishment of the "Great Peace" was built
upon very much the same argument as that advanced for the League of
Nations of 1919.

When the whites first came to North America, the Indians were a
formidable foe. For years they continued to be a menace to the lonely
settler or the frontier village. But when the white settlers were once
firmly established, the days of uncertainty were over, and the Indians
were brushed aside as a man brushes aside a troublesome insect. Their
"uprisings" and "wars" counted for little or nothing. They were inferior
in numbers; they were poorly armed and equipped; they had no reserves
upon which to draw; there was no organization among the tribes in
distant portions of the country. The white millions swept onward. The
Indian bands made a stand here and there but the tide of white
civilization overwhelmed them, smothered them, destroying them and their
civilization together.

The Indians were the first obstacle to the building of the American
Empire. Three hundred years ago the whole three million square miles
that is now the United States was theirs. They were the American people.
To-