The Missionary, hastily rising from his seat, refused to shake hands with them, saying “there was no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the devil.” The Indians smiled and retired in a peaceable manner.[60] Which of these parties best knew the real nature of religion? At all events the missionary was awfully deficient in the spirit of his own, and in the art of winning men to embrace it. CHAPTER XXV. TREATMENT OF THE INDIANS BY THE UNITED STATES,—CONTINUED. The Friends have for many years had schools for the education of the children in different States, and persons employed to engage the Indians in agriculture and manual arts, but they, as well as the missionaries, complain that their efforts have been rendered abortive by the continual removals of the red people by the government. Scarcely was the war over, and American independence proclaimed, when a great strife began betwixt the Republicans and the Indians, for the Indian lands—a strife which extended from the Canadian lakes to the gulph of Florida, and has continued more or less to this moment. Under the British government, the boundaries of the American states had never been well defined. The Americans appointed commissioners to determine them, and appear to have resolved that all Indian claims within the boundaries of the St. Lawrence, the great chain of lakes, and the Mississippi, should be extinguished. They certainly embraced a compact and most magnificent expanse of territory. It was true that the Indians, the ancient and rightful possessors of the soil, had yet large tracts within these lines of demarcation; but, then, what was the power of the Indians to that of the United States? They _could_ be compelled to evacuate their lands, and it was resolved that they _should_. It is totally beyond the limits of my work to follow out the progress of this most unequal and iniquitous strife; whoever wishes to see it fully and very fairly portrayed may do so in a work by an American—“Drake’s Book of the North American Indians.” I can here only simply state, that a more painful and interesting struggle never went on between the overwhelming numbers of the white men, armed with all the powers of science, but unrestrained by the genuine sentiments of religion, and the sons of the forest in their native simplicity. The Americans tell us that this apparently hard and arbitrary measure will eventually prove the most merciful. That the Indians cannot live by the side of white men; they are always quarrelling with and murdering them; and that is but too true; and the Indians in strains of the most indignant and pathetic eloquence, tell us the reason why. It is because the white invaders are eternally encroaching on their bounds, destroying their deer and their fish, and murdering the Indians too without ceremony. It is this recklessness of law and conscience, and the ever-rolling tide of white population westward, which raised up Tecumseh, and