The misery attending the first planting of our colonies in America was equal to the badness of our principles. The very first thing which the colonists in the majority of cases seem to have done, was to insult and maltreat the natives, thus making them their mortal enemies, and thus cutting off all chance of the succours they needed from the land, and the security essential to their very existence. For about a century, nothing but wretchedness, failure, famine, massacres by the Indians, were the news from the American colonies. The more northern ones, as Nova Scotia, Canada, and New York, we took from the French and the Dutch; the more southern, as Florida and Louisiana, were obtained at a later day from the Spaniards. We shall here therefore confine our brief notice chiefly to the manner of settling the central eastern states, particularly Virginia, New England, and Pennsylvania. For eighty-two years from the granting of the charter by Elizabeth to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to the abandonment of the country by Sir Walter Raleigh for his El Dorado visions, the colony of Virginia suffered nothing but miseries, and was become, at that period, a total failure. The first settlers were, like the Spaniards, all on fire in quest of gold. They got into squabbles with the Indians, and the remnant of them was only saved by Sir Francis Drake happening to touch there on his way home from a cruise in the West Indies. A second set of adventurers were massacred by the Indians, not without sufficient provocation; and a third perished by the same means, or by famine induced by their unprincipled and impolitic treatment of the natives. The first successful settlement which was formed was that of James-Town, on James River, in Chesapeak Bay, in 1607. But even here scarcely had they located themselves, when their abuse of the Indians involved them in a savage warfare with them. They took possession of their hunting-grounds without ceremony; and they cheated them in every possible way in their transactions with them, especially in the purchases of their furs. That they might on the easiest terms have lived amicably with the Indians, the history of the celebrated Captain John Smith of that time sufficiently testifies. He had been put out of his rank, and treated with every contumely by his fellow colonists, till they found themselves on the verge of destruction from the enraged natives. They then meanly implored him to save them, and he soon effected their safety by that obvious policy which, if men were not blinded by their own wickedness, would universally best answer their purpose. He began to conciliate the offended tribes; to offer them presents and promises of kindness; and the consequence was, they soon flocked into the settlement again in the most friendly manner, and with plenty of provisions. But even Smith was not sufficiently aware of the power of friendship; he chose rather to attack some of the Indians than to treat