Before the advent of the whites the natives seem to have been thrifty and provident, laying up stores for contingencies. With English implements and weapons, their facilities for planting and hunting were greatly increased, and their products should have been correspondingly larger. The unlimited demand for furs should have stimulated the chase, and their sale should have added to their comforts in food and shelter. By their contact with the whites, their lives should have been changed for the better. Was this the effect? The contrary is notoriously true. The increased income was squandered in liquors. Like thousands to-day, they would give their most costly possessions to gratify their appetite for strong drink. When the corn crop was short, and gave out in the spring, or had been squandered for rum, they borrowed of the traders, paying two hundred per cent for it at harvest. They became poor, shiftless, and dependent. They even pledged their children as security, to be held as slaves in default of contract. They knew they were debased, and despised by the superior race, and felt their degradation. To this condition had come the remnant of the Pocomtucks; a power which within a generation had humbled the fierce Mohawks, and scattered in battle the armies of Uncas the Mohegan. To the natives, the English fur-trader was the representative of his race; and as they gradually found themselves no match for his methods or his morals, their simple faith in the white man's honesty, their debasing fear of his prowess, their reverence for him as a superhuman being, little by little died out. They saw themselves wronged, despoiled, and abused, with less and less power to assert their rights and maintain their independence; and their hearts became more and more filled with a sullen desire for revenge. In the ethics of the North American Indian, there was but one mode of gratifying this feeling. Nothing would suffice but the blood of the offender. This fearful code, with all its horrors, was felt alike by the innocent and the guilty, when Philip and the hour came.