atters would indorse your
policy."

"You don't mean to say that Greeley would disapprove of letting poor
Peter have a gun to shoot game to help support his family--do you?"
asked Ben, in astonishment.

"Certainly I do. With that fifty dollars, he could have procured tools
and seed, and started a farm on Indian Island. Instead of that, you give
him the means of continuing a savage, instead of encouraging him to
become a farmer and a civilized being. Horace Greeley would have
tried--"

"To attempt an impossibility," said La Salle, excitedly. "As well may
you expect to raise a draught horse from a pair of racers, or keep a
flock of eagles as you would a coop of hens. The French have been the
only people on this continent with an Indian policy founded in reason,
and a just estimate of the character and capabilities of the
aborigines."

"And yet they were completely driven from this continent," said Kennedy.

"True, sir; but their Indian policy made their scanty population of two
hundred thousand Europeans a dreaded foe to the nearly three million
colonists of English descent. They made of their savage allies an arm
that struck secretly, swiftly, and with terrible effect, and a defence
that kept actual hostilities a long distance from their main
settlements. I believe, sir, that the philosophers of the future will
condemn alike our policy of extermination, and the impossible attempt to
mould hunters, warriors, and absolutely free men, into peaceful,
plodding citizens of a republic."

"What else can be done with them?" asked Kennedy, sharply.

"It seems to me that in generations to come, it will be said of us,
'They did not try in those days to yoke the racer to the plough, nor to
chain the hound to the kennel, while they urged the mastiff on the track
of the deer; yet they failed to see that the Creator, and peculiar
conditions unchanged for centuries, had moulded the races of men to
different forms of government, modes of life, and varieties of
avocation. The Roman conqueror of the world knew better than to put in
his heavily-armed legions the flying Parthian, the light-armed horseman
of Numidia, or the slinger of the Balearic Isles. The American of the
past had at his disposal a race capable of being the skirmish line of
his march of civilization to wrest a continent from the wilderness. As
trappers, hunters, and guides; as fishermen and slayers of whale and
seal; as the light horseman, quick, brave, self-sustaini