but we do not boast of the failure to exterminate. In the face of our relations with him, it ill becomes our humanity to say, that "the only good Indian is a dead one!"

Before passing any hasty judgment upon what civilisation is pleased to call "the savage tribes" of this continent, it is worth while for a moment to look at the relations civilisation has had with the savages. Tribal wars, we know, are of immemorial antiquity; but had the incoming of Europeans no influence in either extending them, or in adding to their ferocity? It would be easy to prove that the contrary is the fact. What, for instance, gave increased violence to Iroquois enmity to the Hurons, but the intermeddling, in 1615, of Champlain and his French following. In the early colonial days, settlement on the Atlantic seaboard was effected only after devastating wars had been waged upon the natives. What story is more harrowing in all history than that of Spanish settlement in Florida, or more revolting than the narrative of King Philips' War in New England? Nor do we find the records of Dutch colonisation in New York State, or the contemporary history of Virginia, less full of horrors. Westward, the same tale of carnage is written over the face of the country. Let the reader recall the strife between the red man and the white in the region between the Alleghanies and the Ohio, and say on which side was displayed the greatest ferocity. But we need not go so far back in history for instances of inhumanity towards the Indian. To read the relations with the red man of recent border men in Kentucky, of Indianized white men in Texas, and of the traditional trader and cow-boy of the western plains, would curdle the blood of the most abandoned representative of modern civilisation. In all the range and license of human passion, history has no greater atrocities to chronicle.

The blood of white men, it is true, has been freely out poured by the hand of the Indian. But this blood has, in the main, flowed at the instigation of white men, to revenge themselves on their European rivals. In shedding it the Indian ally has not scantily shed his own. A recent American writer,* on colonial relations with the Indians, bears testimony to this fact. Here are his remarks:

"

During our whole colonial and provincial period it was the hard fate of the Indians to bear the brunt of every quarrel between the rival European colonists in their jealousies and struggles for dominion and the profits of the fur-trade. No sooner had one of the rivals conciliated or established friendly relations with one or more of the tribes, than the representatives of the other rival would seek to thwart any advantage of their opponents by openly or covertly forming alliances with other tribes. Tribes which might otherwise have lived in a state of suspended animosity towards each other were thus driven to take the war-path. So, too, it has happened that the whole or a portion of a tribe, or of allied tribes, in the course of a century was found in the pay and service of the French against the English; of the English against the French; of the Spaniards against the French; and of the French against the Spaniards; and then of the armies of Great Britain and our own provincial forces against the French, followed in a few years by their enlistment by Great Britain to aid her in crushing the rebellion of her own colonies."

The heat of these periods of conflict among Europeans on this continent has long passed, and we ought now to be just and humane enough to lay at our own doors responsibility for inciting the Indians to acts of savagery. There is the more reason for this, as these acts were mainly the result of ou own follies and our own intrigues. It may be that, as Horace Greeley on one occasion wrote, "it needs but little familia

"The Red Man and the White Man in North America." By George E. Ellis, Boston, 1882. (Page 346).

J

rity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince any one that the poetic Indian, the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow, is only visible to the poet's eye." But while we divest the child of the woods of those fictional fascinations that have made him an interesting and picturesque figure in the world of western humanity, we are not called upon to paint him in the pigments of the pit, or to endow him with the attributes of fiends. No doubt, the Indian, in mental characteristics, is alien to the European race, that his thoughts run in a different channel from our thoughts, and that he is a creature of instinct rather than of reason; but though of another mental type, it does not follow that we should visit upon him giant injustice, or that he should even forfeit his claim to considerate treatment at our hands.

The late General Custer, of the American army, has told us that while he found much to interest him in the study of the Indian character, particularly in the wonderful power and subtlety of his senses, he was compelled to admit, from his intimate association with the red man, that he was essentially a savage; and that while civilisation may and should do much for him, it can never civilise him. But this unfortunate, foolhardy officer lived among Indians who were the hunted of the earth, and whose every instinct was trained to its acutest sense, that their possessors might cunningly hold their own against men who were known to glory in the professional title of "Indian fighters." How different is the judgment of Catlin, the great delineator of Indian character. Of the North American Indian, this great painter sympathetically, though frankly writes, that in his native state, "he is an hospitable, honest, faithful, brave, warlike, cruel, revengeful, relentless, yet honourable, contemplative and religious being." He adds, "I have lived with thousands and tens of thousands of these.knights of the forest, whose whole lives are lives of chivalry, and whose daily feats

with their naked limbs, might vie with those of the Grecian youth in the beautiful rivalry of the Olympian games." In another passage he affirms, that "they have learned their worst vices from contamination with Europeans," but withal that they are nature's noblemen, and deserve ever to be spoken of with sympathy," as a people who are dying of broken hearts, and who never can speak in the civilised world in their own defence."

The truth is, that on this continent, as elsewhere among tribes living in a state of nature, opinions are formed about the aboriginal inhabitants pretty much as individual experience has enabled the writer personally to judge. This experience has been more or less determined by the attitude assumed towards them of the observer of their manners and customs. The mild Livingstone, travelling unarmed in the heart of Africa, has given us a picture of the native tribes of the Dark Continent altogether different from that of the bumptious, self-asserting Stanley, with his self-cocking revolver and explosive bullets. Similarly, in the western world, we have diversities of portraiture of our native tribes, limned according to the dispositions and bearing of the writers who have made their acquaintance. As with the white man so with the red, there are two sides to the Indian shield; each represents the Indian character in the mood in which you force the savage to look at himself. Take this one other, and a dispassionate, view of the Indian character from Jonathan Carver:

That the Indians," writes he, "are of a cruel, revengeful, inexorable disposition, that they will watch whole days unmindful of the calls of nature, and make their way through pathless, and almost unbounded woods, subsisting only on the scanty produce of them, to pursue and revenge themselves on an enemy; that they hear unmoved the piercing cries of such as unhappily fall into their hands, and receive a diabolical

pleasure from the tortures they inflict on their prisoners, I readily grant; but let us look on the reverse of this terrifying picture, and we shall find them temperate both in their diet and potations (I speak of those tribes who have little communication with Europeans) that they withstand, with unexampled patience, the attacks of hunger, or the inclemency of the seasons, and esteem the gratification of their appetites but a secondary consideration. We shall likewise see them sociable and humane to those whom they consider their friends, and even to their adopted enemies; and ready to partake with them of the last morsel or to risk their lives in their defence. The honour of their tribe and the welfare of their nation is the first and predominant emotion of their hearts; and hence proceed in a great measure all their virtues and their vices. Actuated by this, they brave every danger, endure the most exquisite torments, and expire triumphing in their fortitude, not as a personal qualification, but as a national characteristic."

Ethnically, the Indians of Canada, if not one people, have descended from a well-defined parent stock, the Huron-Iroquois tribe. Professor Huxley hypothetically represents the old Mexican and South-America races as the true American stock, and speaks of the Red Indians of North America as the product of an intermixture of the autochthonous, or indigenous, native race with the Eskimo. The affinity of the latter with the Asiatic Mongol is now pretty well established; and we may look upon our native races as remote descendants of the Asiatic continent. We shall leave to Dr. Daniel Wilson, the learned President of Toronto University, the ethnological questions that arise out of this aspect of the Indian problem, premising that the bulk of our readers are not absorbingly interested in skull formations, as indications of racial unity, or in the subtler philological questions that bear on the problem of Indian origin. Whether the dolichocephalic head-form, charac

* Carver's "Travels through the Interior Parts of North America, in the years 1766-68," (page 409-12), London, 1779.