One of the principal arguments, if such it can be called, by which some have sought to prove their incapacity for civilization, is the circumstance of their having so rapidly melted away before the encroachments of the whites, and having so seldom become incorporated with their invaders. But any other result, must have been almost miraculous. Let it be recollected that the whites, not contented with destroying themselves as many as they could, took every opportunity of artfully instigating war between one tribe and another; and that on every occasion on which the various European settlers themselves fell out and fought,

is gone, a civilized man will step into his place and your end is attained."

Although foreign judges are here set aside as necessarily ignorant ones, the intervention of the Atlantic does not prevent the same journal from often writing, and that with great justice and good sense, on European affairs. I cannot see why we may not, with equal justice, express our opinion on matters which concern the western continent. To endeavour to reclaim the Indians from drunkenness and vice, may be by some esteemed opposition to the order of providence ;'-would that there were more men so to oppose it! Be it more and more the distinction of christians, that they unite heart and hand to remove ignorance and oppose vice, whereever they are found and under whatever shape;-that they visit the despised heathens of every country with the Bible in their hands and words of brotherly kindness on their lips, and that they earnestly strive to raise them, from a condition worse than that of the brutes, to the glorious liberty of the children of God.' Why is a poor Indian thought incapable of that mental renovation, which has been experienced by Hindoos, Tahiteans, Greenlanders, and Hottentots? -what is there in his blood or in his brain, that he is thus branded with proscription, and consigned unpitied, to degradation here, and

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each party collected to its aid multitudes of Indian warriors, to be food for the weapons of their destructive warfare. In the contests between the French and British colonists, in the revolutionary war, and in the recent unhappy renewal of hostilities, the Indians were, without reason or pity, involved in contests in which they were no way interested, and crushed between the two contending powers, like grain between the millstones. Rancorous

hatred to the whites and to each other, has been promoted in every possible way; spirituous liquors copiously administered for the basest of purposes ; immorality of every kind eagerly promoted, loathdestruction hereafter? Where were the progenitors of this enlightened writer when Cæsar landed on the shores of England? What redeeming peculiarity was found in their painted skins, which marked the race capable of such ultimate illumination ? Alas for the poor Indians!-left to Jackson in time of war, to backwoods> men and fur-traders in time of peace, and to cold blooded philosophers for their future prospects! "No personal injustice should be tolerated," says this writer, "but do not resist the order of providence which is carrying him away!"

"Ah what is man! And what man reading this,

And having human feelings, does not blush,

And hang his head to think himself a man!"

The following affecting little sketch, which the same writer almost immediately subjoins, is characterized by the same lamentable unfeelingness; but may be regarded as an enemy's testimony, to the harmlessness and honesty of these poor persecuted outcasts.

"A small party of Indians was lately, and is perhaps now, wandering in our neighbourhood. One might easily have mistaken them for gypsies, but for the shade of copper colour, instead of the

some and hitherto unknown diseases propagated; instruction of every kind withheld from them; and yet in the face of all this, we are called upon to hold up our hands like simpletons, and wonder that the Indians have disappeared !10

Let the system be reversed, and reason and experience coincide, in encouraging us to hope for a different result. It is indeed but little that we can do, to atone to the survivors for the injuries

dark olive, in their complexions. Their party of six or eight consisted of three generations, of whom the two first retained a little acquaintance with their native Indian dialect, which in the third was lost. They did not appear to share the quality which is said to sit deep in gypsy blood, that of mistaking their neighbour's hen roost for their own. Whether they would have been able to hold fast their integrity, through the tempting season of June-eating, and early Catharine pears, we cannot undertake to say. While they honoured us with their presence, they led a mighty honest life of basket weaving; and it was no unpleasant sight in the evening, to see the red flames and the heavy smoke curling up round a comfortable iron pot, which they understood how to keep boiling as well as their neighbours. Neither can they be said to have been devoid of taste; for they took up their abode on about the pleasantest spot which the district contains, and added by their romantic encampment a new beauty to Jamaica Pond; of a kind we suppose not wholly to the taste of the neighbouring municipality, who soon approved their descent from the pilgrims, and after a lapse of two or three weeks, drove out these heathens without further ceremony."

10 I should have been glad could I have alluded to these enormities only as a tale of other times,' but the conduct of some of the American officers in the recent contests with the Creeks and the Seminoles was to the last degree inhuman. Their official despatches avow, that villages were surrounded at midnight, and the

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which their race has suffered at our hands, but let us at least try to do what we can. Let us do for all the surviving nations, what has been begun to be done for the Tuscaroras. They are groping in darkness—let us give them in their own languages the light of Divine truth; they are idlelet us present them with inducements to industry; they have been cut off from the chase-let us give

inhabitants slaughtered with such indiscriminate fury, that even women and children perished in the assault.

It must however be mentioned, that the United States have passed several laws to mitigate, as much as possible, the wretchedness of the scattered remnants of the Indians. They have given legislative encouragement to missionaries and teachers to settle among them ; they have also prohibited private individuals from purchasing their land, thus saving them from the cupidity and fraud of unprincipled speculators. All sales must now be made to the agents of government, and they are conducted with probably as much fairness as will ever be found, in bargains where the one party has no choice but to take whatever the other is pleased to give ;—" acres for beads and penknives," says an intelligent American writer, "provinces for blankets, and empires for powder, ball, and rum !-A heavy reckoning rests on the heads of the civilized communities in America, for their cruel treatment of the American aborigines, and of the not less injured Africans." "They say that they have bought the land," exclaims Mr. Wirt, the present Attorney General of the United States, "bought it! Yes; of whom? Of the poor trembling natives, who knew that refusal would be in vain; and who strove to make a merit of necessity, by seeming to yield with grace, what they knew they had not the power to retain. Such a bargain may appease the conscience of a gentleman of the green bag, worn and hackneyed in the arts and frauds of his profession; but in Heaven's chancery, there can be little doubt that it has been long since set aside on the ground of duress." Letters of the British. Spy, 7th edit.

78.

them a knowledge of the useful arts; they are spiritless and disheartened-let us cheer them with the hope of present comfort and future happiness; let the use of ardent spirits be by every possible means discouraged; let them be protected from the unprincipled artifices of those, with whom a desire for gain obliterates every consideration of moral duty; along with all let them be offered the hand of disinterested friendship and sincere brotherly kindness, and there is not a doubt but that they will grasp and press it to their heart. Let the rising generation receive the unappréciable benefits of early education, mechanical, literary, and religious; and let no one question the truth of what the wise man said, of training up a child in the way he should go. The moral waste will then assume an aspect of culture and fertility; confusion will give place to order, sloth to industry, misery to happiness, and, as the glorious consummation of, all, on the red Indians of North America, the sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing under his wings.'

Within these few years the history, languages, and religion,11 of these scattered tribes, have begun

What is here communicated respecting the languages and religion of the Indian tribes relates to those who lived eastward of the Mississippi, and chiefly to the Lenapé or Delawares. My principal authority is the very interesting work of Mr. John Heckewelder, of the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, in Pennsylvania, who has spent the greater part of a pretty long life as a missionary among the Indians; and whose work is characterized throughout with candour,