A great nation of proud, independent, liberty-loving men and women, came into conflict with the whites of the Carolinas and Georgia; with the state and national governments. "For two hundred years a contest involving their very existence as a people has been maintained against the unscrupulous rapacity of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By degrees they were driven from their ancestral domain to an unknown and inhabitable region" (p. 371). Now the contest is ended. The white men have the land. The Cherokees have a little patch of territory; government support; free schools and the right to accept the sovereignty of the nation that has conquered them. The theory upon which the whites proceeded in taking the Indian lands is thus stated by Leupp,--"Originally, the Indians owned all the land; later we needed most of it for ourselves; therefore, it is but just that the Indians should have what is left."[10] 4. _The Triumph of the Whites_ The early white settlers had been, in almost every instance, hospitably or even reverentially welcomed by the Indians, who regarded them as children of the Great White Spirit. During the first bitter winters, it was the Indians who fed the colonists from their supplies of grain; guided them to the better lands, and shared with them their knowledge of hunting, fishing and agriculture. The whites retaliated with that cunning, grasping, bestial ferocity which has spread terror through the earth during the past five centuries. In the early years, when the whites were few and the Indians many, the whites satisfied themselves by debauching the red men with whiskey and bribing them with baubles and trinkets. At the same time they made offensive and defensive alliances with them. The Spanish in the South; the French in the North and the English between, leagued themselves with the various tribes, supplied them with gunpowder and turned them into mercenaries who fought for hire. Heretofore the Indian had been a free man, fighting his wars and feuds as free men have done time out of mind. The whites hired him as a professional soldier and by putting bounties on scalps, plying the Indians with whiskey and inciting them by every known device, they converted them into demons. There is no evidence to show that up to the advent of the white men the Indian tribes did any more fighting among themselves than the nobles of Germany, the city states of Italy or the other inhabitants of western Europe. Indeed there has recently been published a complete translation of the "Constitution of the Five Nations," a league to enforce peace which the Indians organized about the year 1390, A. D.[11] This league which had as its object the establishment of the "Great Peace" was built upon very much the same argument as that advanced for the League of Nations of 1919.