The red man and the white are separated indeed by the prodigious distances (ethnologically speaking) not only of race and language, but of noble tradition and glorious history. They could never amalgamate in blood, or in the so-called natural sympathies of man. They seem to be born enemies! as their feelings and their instincts apparently reach them when they come into contact with each other. They cannot exist side by side. A mightier than they holds the destinies of both in His hands. He has tried the redskins. He has given them a good chance upon the earth, and they have failed to do anything but kill buffalo and breed like rats--often burrowing like rats--refusing to dig and plant the teeming, beneficent earth which had been committed to their charge; and preferring, generally, the life of a vagabond loafer to that of a thrifty, careful husbandman. I do not blame them. They are as God made them, and man left them; for, I suppose, their forebears--somewhere afar off in Asia, perhaps, in the dim, immemorial ages--had all passed through the various phases of the civilization of their time, and that they did not grow out of the tail of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible reason there could be for the perpetuation--let alone the creation--of such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for unknown centuries--before the white man ever saw their faces--many thousands of them still squatting there, cleaving, like bereaved Autochthons, to the bosom of the dear old mother who had whelped and so long nurtured them; and trying to make themselves believe that they are still masters of the continent. What they were made for at all, I do not pretend to divine. The Divine Maker of all knows best, and what He does is its own justification--satisfying the wellnigh insatiable cry of the universe for universal justice. They are the saurians of humanity; and it is remarkable that the idea of 'progressive development'--if I may be pardoned for making use of a term in modern philosophy about which there has been so much assumption and canting--it is remarkable that this idea, which the name of _saurian_ suggests, should run through all nature, and be embodied in her finest forms and intelligences. There is a considerable distance between the saurian and good Master Adam, the gardener of Eden; but it seems to me, after all, that this brutal, foul, obscene monster of the prime, was only Adam in the making. He came after him, a long way, at all events; and if geology had been fashionable in his time, and he a _savant_, he might have chalked out for himself a very fine pedigree.