to out do the other in acts of revolting atrocity. The stern, cold
hauteur, the rude, coarse insolence, and the grasping, insatiable
cupidity of the latter inevitably aroused every demon in the Indian
breast. The English colonists knew no arts of Indian conciliation. Their
tactics were limited to fire water in advance, and the sword in reserve
to avenge the acts of madness excited thereby. The race has not
degenerated at all, in these respects, since the marauding Saxon
scourged the Baltic shores of Britain. In support of this, witness the
efforts of England to force an interdicted and demoralizing commerce
upon the passive Chinese; witness her success in saddling the spawn of
her aristocracy upon the necks of the subjugated Hindoo and Sepoy,
compelling the worshippers of both Vishnu, and Mahomet to bow before
crosier and mitre; witness the long and cruel oppression of her Celtic
neighbors; witness how we, shoots from the same scion, have carried the
bible in our hand and the whisky bottle in the other, while in the rear
came the rifle of the backwoodsman to enforce all arguments with the
untutored savages; witness how volunteers have rallied around the stars
and stripes, and pushed the original possessors of the soil backwards,
ever backwards, until a new wave comes rolling from the Pacific coast
upon his rear; witness the cruel and inglorious wars--if by that name
they may be dignified--in Florida and Oregon, excited by mercenary and
unscrupulous jobbers for the sake of a chance of plunder from the
National treasury; witness the bullying of and final conflict with the
mongrel races of poor, decrepit, imbecile Mexico, whereby the auriferous
valleys of California and the sterile wastes of New Mexico were wrested
from her nerveless grasp; witness the filibustering forays in Central
America; and witness the undisguised lusting after the Gem of the
Antilles, and the unblushing announcement made at Ostend, by dignified
statesmen, claiming, in the nineteenth century, to be Christians, and
representing, not cannibal savages or outlawed pirates, but a people who
profess to acknowledge the divine injunction, "do unto others as you
would that they should do unto you," and to believe that the command,
"thou shalt not steal," is as imperative now as it was in the days of
the great Jewish law giver.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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