The people brought with them from Europe, crimes and abominations that the Indians never knew. The Indians never fought for conquest, but to defend their hunting grounds—lands which their ancestors had inhabited for generations, and which they firmly believed were given to them by the Great Spirit; but these white invaders had a boundless and quenchless thirst for every region that they could set their eyes upon. They claimed it by pretences, of which the simple Indians could neither make head nor tail—they talked of popes and kings on the other side of the water as having given them the Indians’ countries, and the Indians could not conceive what business these kings and popes had with them. But the whites had arguments which they _could not_ withstand—_gunpowder and rum_! They forced a footing in the Indian countries, and then they gave them rum to take away their brains, that they might take away first their peltries, and then more land. There is nothing in history more horrible than the conduct to which the Dutch, French and English resorted in their rivalries in the north-east of America. Each party subdued the tribes of Indians in their own immediate neighbourhood, by force and fraud, and then employed them against the Indians who were in alliance with their rivals. Instead of mutually, as Christians should, inculcating upon them the beauty and the duty, and the advantages of peace, they instigated them, by every possible means, and by the most devilish arguments, to betray and exterminate one another, and not only one another, but to betray and exterminate, if possible, their white rivals. They made them furious with rum, and put fire-arms into their hands, and hounded them on one another with a demoniac glee. They took credit to themselves for inducing the Indians to _scalp_ one another! They gave them a premium upon these horrible outrages, and we shall see that even the Puritans of New England gave at length so much as 1000_l._ for every Indian scalp that could be brought to them! They excited these poor Indians by the most diabolical means, and by taking advantage of their weak side, the proneness to vengeance, to acts of the most atrocious nature, and then they branded them, when it was convenient, as most fearful and bloody savages, and on that plea drove them out of their rightful possessions, or butchered them upon them.