Although living lives of easy poverty, the wild tribes of America everywhere possessed dormant wealth enough to tempt the cupidity alike of the fierce Spaniard, the blithe Frenchman, and the sombre Englishman. Under a burning tropical sun, where neither meat nor clothing was essential to comfort, the land yielded gold, while in hyperborean forests where no precious metals were discovered the richest peltries abounded; so that no savage in all this northern continent was found so poor that grasping civilization could find nothing to rob him of. When Europe undertook the mastery of America, she found the people, as a rule, ready to be friendly. Some at first were startled into the seizure of their arms, the first impulse of the wild man on meeting anything strange being to defend himself. But their fears were easily allayed, their confidence easily gained, and their pledges of good faith were usually to be depended upon. [Sidenote: COMPARATIVE CHARACTERISTICS.] The variations between them and their brethren across the Atlantic were less of kind than of quality. They were more children than wild beasts. Physically they were complete, but mentally they were not fully developed. Their minds were not so broad, nor so strong or subtle as those of white men. Their cunning partook more of brute instinct than of civilized artifice. There was mind-power enough, but it lacked shape and consistency. They were naturally no more blood-thirsty, or cruel, or superstitious than their conquerors, but their cruelty and superstitions were of coarser, cruder forms. The American aboriginal character has been greatly misconstrued, and is to-day but imperfectly understood. The chief difference, or cause of difference, between the people of Europe and the more advanced nations of America, it seems to me, lay in the ignorance of some few things, apparently insignificant in themselves, yet mighty enough to revolutionize Christendom; such as the use of iron, gunpowder, and movable types. The absence of horses, and other of the more useful domestic animals, was also a disadvantage. After reading of the Europeans of that day it is irony to call the Americans revengeful or cruel. Where is it possible to find more strongly developed those qualities which civilization most condemns than among civilized nations—the same, only refined? So blind are we to our own faults, so quick to see and condemn the faults of our weak and defenceless neighbor!