Our general impression of the native American, the Amerind, is that he is a kind of human demon, or wild animal, never to be trusted, unable to keep a compact, always thirsting for gore; but it is a mistake. He is not altogether unreliable. The Iroquois maintained the “covenant chain” with the British unbroken for a round century. The Amerind never broke faith with Penn, and it is seldom that he will violate any compact that he fully understands he has entered into. His daily life in the earlier days was by no means bloodthirsty. Powell has truly said that the scalping-knife was no more the emblem of pre-Columbian society than the bayonet is of ours of the nineteenth century. In the United States existence of a trifle over a hundred years have been waged several long and bloody wars, one the most gigantic known to history, all police records are full of horrible crimes the Amerind was a stranger to, and within a year or so _white people_ have burned alive several victims. When anyone defends the Amerind he is accused of trying to make an angel of him, but this only shows again how universally unjust toward him we are. We are blind to our own shortcomings and exaggerate those of the Amerind. It was inevitable that the weaker race should be forced to the wall, but we can at least give it credit for any good that was in it without injuring ourselves. In estimating their traits we do not regard them enough from their own standpoint, and without so regarding them we cannot understand them. The Amerind was something of a farmer, of an architect, of an engineer, of a statesman, of an artist, the amount and quality of his interest in these things depending, as with us, on circumstances. In most localities, he achieved for all what all are with us still dreaming to attain, “liberty and a living,” and his methods of government possessed admirable qualities. We call him lazy and despise him for it, but many of our people would not work if they could avoid it. One of Balzac’s characters is made to say: “I fear God; but I am still more afraid of the hell of poverty. To be without a penny is the last degree of misery in our present social state.” The great philosopher here put European life in a nut-shell. The Amerind was fortunate perhaps in not knowing what poverty, as we understand it, is. With him the keen eye, the woodman’s skill, and a generous and abundant soil gave him his daily bread. The idea of piling up treasure for the satisfaction of holding it did not occur to him any more than did killing of game for pleasure. A tribe may have passed through famine, but the individual never knew hunger in the midst of riches, as the civilised man so often meets it. Not long ago a whole family wandering about the streets of New York, homeless and without food, dropped from exhaustion at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway. In Amerind society, such an occurrence would have been impossible. No friendly stranger ever left