Poison too has been called in aid. Speaking of the Yuta Indians, a traveller assures us that ‘as in Australia, arsenic and corrosive sublimate in springs and provisions have diminished their number.’[234] And in the same way ‘poisoned rum helped to exterminate the Tasmanians.’[235] But there is worse yet in this direction. The Portuguese in Brazil, when the importation of slaves from Africa rendered the capture of the natives less desirable than their extermination, left the clothes of persons who had died of small-pox or scarlet fever to be found by them in the woods.[236] And the caravan traders from the Missouri to Santa Fé are said by the same method or in presents of tobacco to have communicated the small-pox to the Indian tribes of that district in 1831.[237] The enormous depopulation of most tribes by the small-pox since their acquaintance with the whites is one of the most remarkable results in the history of their mutual connection; nor is it likely ever to be known to what extent the coincidence was accidental. It is pleasant to turn from these practical illustrations of the theory that no laws of war need be regarded in hostilities with savage tribes to the only recorded trial of a contrary system, and to find, not only that it is associated with one of the greatest names in English history, but also that the success it met with fully justifies the suspicion and disfavour with which the commoner usage is beginning to be regarded. The Indians with whom Penn made his famous treaty in 1682 (of which Voltaire said that it was the only treaty that was never ratified by an oath, and the only treaty that was never broken), were of the same Algonquin race with whom the Dutch had scarcely ever kept at peace, and against whom they had warred in the customary ruthless fashion of those times. The treaty was based on the principle of an adjustment of differences by a tribunal of an equal number of Red men and of White. ‘Penn,’ says the historian, ‘came without arms; he declared his purpose to abstain from violence, he had no message but peace, and not one drop of Quaker blood was ever shed by an Indian’[238] For more than seventy years, from 1682 to 1754, when the French war broke out, in short, during the whole time that the Quakers had the principal share in the government of Pennsylvania, the history of the Indians and Whites in that province was free from the tale of murders and hostilities that was so common in other districts; so that the single instance in which the experiment of equal laws and forbearance has been patiently persevered in, can at least boast of a success that in support of the contrary system it were very difficult to find for an equal number of years in any other part of the world.