The world over, white men, representing a higher type of civilization,
have wrested, or are still wresting, the land from the original savage
occupants. This seems to be inevitable. It is one of the means by which
civilization is being extended over the entire globe. We glory in the
progress of civilization; but we are apt to ignore the hardship which
this brings to the aborigines. While not relaxing our endeavor to plant
the world with progressive men who shall make the most of life, we
should see to it that the savage races are pushed to the wall with as
kindly and forbearing a hand as possible; that we apply to them humane
methods, and give them credit for possessing the sentiments of men who,
like us, dearly love their old homes, and are willing to fight for them.
These sentiments have certainly not often been applied in the past, by
our Anglo-Saxon race, to the Indians of North America.
We have failed to appreciate that the Indian, in being driven from his
lands, has retaliated from motives of patriotism. His methods of
fighting are often cruel and treacherous; but it must be remembered that
he is in a stage of development akin to that of the child, and that
white men upon the frontier have often been quite as cruel and
treacherous toward the Indian as he was toward them, for such are ever
the methods of the weak and the primitive. The Indian is blamed for his
custom of wreaking vengeance upon all white men, when but an individual
has injured him; yet, on the border, it has always been seen that white
men have retaliated on the Indians in exactly the same spirit. "The only
good Indian is a dead Indian," has been their motto, the offense of one
Indian being considered the offense of all. Our dealings with the red
men, both as individuals and as a nation, have, for over a hundred
years, often been such as we should blush for. We are doing better now
than formerly; but our treatment of the weak and unfortunate aborigines
is still far from being to our credit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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