of the Pacific Coast, written by H. H. Bancroft. They are
treasure-houses of material for the future historian. Hubert Bancroft
has become the historian of the Spanish dominion in the United States,
and deserves favorable thought for his wealth of research into archives
which might have been lost, or at least less ample with the advance of
time. Topography, geography, archaeology. State papers,--all have
contributed their quota to him, and he has, after the generous manner
of the scholar, contributed to us.

Francis Parkman is a distinguished master in the art of history. His
theme is the "American Indian" and the "French Occupancy of America,"
and he has told a thrilling story. He knows the Indian as no one of
our historians has known him, and has told of his noble traits, and his
ruthless forays, and his sanguine cruelty. His utter lack of thrift;
his feast-and-famine life; his stealth, stolidity, duplicity, and
ferocity,--all are rehearsed. To read his record of the Indian is to
have much of the glamour thrown around him by James Fenimore Cooper
stripped from him incontinently and forever. The Indian was
self-exterminative. He was the assassin of his race, and civilization
was impossible so long as the American Indian was dominant; so that
those who shed tears over the white man's conquest of the Indian may
not well have weighed their cause. The Indian was not the quiet,
inoffensive innocent presented in Cuba at its discovery. There were
Indians and Indians. Some of them were friendly, peaceful, and kindly;
but that this was the character of the American Indian as a whole is
totally incorrect. Parkman shows that the Indian was, throughout North
America, in his native strength furious in his ferocity, relentless as
death, cruel beyond imagination, and occupied a territory he neither
cultivated nor attempted to. The Indians were military vagabonds,
whose continued control had left America an unpeopled wilderness to
this day. Huntsmen and warriors they were; citizens and cultivators
and civilizers they were not, and never would have been. Parkman tells
the truth as history found them, and those truths are well worth our
reading, because in their perusal we pass from sentimentality to
reason, and see how this America of our day, rich, cultivated,
civilized, and possessed of the largest amount of personal liberty ever
vouchsafed to a citizen, is a noble exchange for the thoughtlessness,
improvidence, and