It is not unusual to sneer at the sentimentality of "the Quakers" and other active friends of this race. But we may as well remember that posterity will grow much more sentimental over the fate of the Indian than any Quaker or philanthropist of to-day. The United States will be judged at the bar of history according to what they shall have done in two respects,--by their disposition of negro slavery, and by their treatment of the Indians. In the one matter, the result is fortunately secure; nor will it be remembered against us, in diminution of our honor, that we procrastinated and sought to evade the issue, and for a time made terms and compromised with wrong. In that, when at last we were brought face to face with the question, we did the one thing that was right, and in tears and blood expiated our own and our fathers' errors, the ages to come will give us no grudging and stinted praise. Would that we were equally sure that no stain will rest upon our fame for what shall yet be done or left undone towards the original possessors of our soil! What is past cannot be recalled; nor has any thing yet gone into history that need deeply dishonor us as a nation. Posterity will judge very leniently of all that has been done in heat of blood, in the struggle for life and for the possession of the soil by the early Colonists; it will not greatly attribute blame that, in our industrial and territorial expansion, and a conquest of savage nature more rapid than is recorded of any other people, savage man has suffered somewhat at our hands; it will not attempt nicely to apportion the mutual injuries of the frontier, to decide which was first and which was worst in wrong, red man or white; it will have ample consideration for the difficulties which the government has encountered in preserving the peace between the natives and the bold, rude pioneers of civilization. But if, when the Indians shall have been thrown helpless upon our mercy, surrounded and disarmed by the extension of settlement, and impoverished by the very causes which promote our wealth and greatness, we fail to make ample provision out of our abundance, and to apply it in all patience and with all pains, to save alive these remnants of a once powerful people, and reconcile them to civilization, there is much reason to fear, that, however successfully we may excuse ourselves to ourselves by pleading the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, impartial history will pronounce us recreant to a sacred duty. FOOTNOTES: [K] From The International Review, May, 1874. [L] The doctrine of a _vanishing_ Indian nationality was strongly insisted on by Mr. Justice McLean in his opinion in Worcester vs. the State of Georgia:--