[Footnote 40: "The whole history of Indian warfare," says Mr. Schoolcraft, "might be challenged in vain for a solitary instance of this kind. The Indians believe that to take a dishonourable advantage of their female prisoners would destroy their luck in hunting; it would be considered as effeminate and degrading in a warrior, and render him unfit for, and unworthy of, all manly achievement."] THE SAVAGE AND THE CHRISTIAN. To return to the Indians. After telling me some other particulars, which gave me a clearer view of their notions and feelings on these points than I ever had before, my informant mildly added,--"It is a constant and favourite subject of reproach against the Indians--this barbarism of their desultory warfare; but I should think more women and children have perished in _one_ of your civilised sieges, and that in late times, than during the whole war between the Chippewas and Sioux, and _that_ has lasted a century." I was silent, for there is a sensible proverb about taking care of our own glass windows: and I wonder if any of the recorded atrocities of Indian warfare or Indian vengeance, or all of them together, ever exceeded Massena's retreat from Portugal,--and the French call themselves civilised. A war party of Indians, perhaps two or three hundred (and that is a very large number), dance their war dance, go out and burn a village, and bring back twenty or thirty scalps. _They_ are savages and heathens. We Europeans fight a battle, leave fifty thousand dead or dying by inches on the field, and a hundred thousand to mourn them, desolate; but _we_ are civilised and Christians. Then only look into the motives and causes of our bloodiest European wars as revealed in the private history of courts:--the miserable, puerile, degrading intrigues which set man against man--so horridly disproportioned to the horrid result! and then see the Indian take up his war-hatchet in vengeance for some personal injury, or from motives that rouse all the natural feelings of the natural man within him! Really I do not see that an Indian warrior, flourishing his tomahawk, and smeared with his enemy's blood, is so very much a greater savage than the pipe-clayed, padded, embroidered personage, who, without cause or motive, has sold himself to slay or be slain: one scalps his enemy, the other rips him open with a sabre; one smashes his brains with a tomahawk, and the other blows him to atoms with a cannon-ball: and to me, femininely speaking, there is not a needle's point difference between the one and the other. If war be unchristian and barbarous, then war as a _science_ is more absurd, unnatural, unchristian than war as a _passion_. This, perhaps, is putting it all too strongly, and a little exaggerated--