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Under the instructions of the Jesuits, they learned to swing censers and to chant aves. Gathering round Eliot, in Massachusetts, the tawny choir sang the psalms of David, in Indian, "to one of the ordinary English tunes, melodiously;" and, in the school of Brainerd, thirty Lenape boys could answer all the questions in the Westminster Assem. bly's Catechism. There were examples among them of men who, under the guidance of missionaries, became anxious for their salvation, having faith enough for despair, if not for conversion; of the submission of warriors to the penance imposed by the Roman church; and the sanctity of a Mohawk maiden, -the American Geneveva,-who preserved her vows of chastity, is celebrated in the early histories of New France. They recognised the connection between the principles of Christian morals and faint intuitions of their own; and, even in the doctrine of the divine unity, they seemed to find not so much a novelty as the revival of a slumbering reminiscence. They were not good arithmeticians; their tales of the number of their years, or of the warriors in their clans, are little to be relied on; and yet everywhere they counted like Leibnitz and Laplace, and, from the influence of some law that pervades humanity, they began to repeat at ten. They could not dance like those trained to attitudes of grace; they could not sketch light ornaments like Raphael; yet, under every sky, they delighted in a rhythmic repetition of forms and sounds, would move in cadence to wild melodies, and, with elegance and imitative power, they would tattoo their skins with harmonious arabesques. We call them cruel; yet they never invented the thumb-screw, or the boot, or the rack, or broke on the wheel, or exiled bands of their nations for opinion's sake; and never protected the monopoly of a medicine man by the gallows or the block, or by fire. There is not a quality belonging to the white man, which did not also belong to the American savage; there is not among the aborigines a rule of language, a custom, or an institution, which, when considered in its principle, has not a counterpart among their conquerors. The unity of the human race is established by the exact correspondence

between their respective powers; the Indian has not one more, has not one less, than the white man; the map of the faculties is for both identical.

When, from the general characteristics of humanity, we come to the comparison of powers, the existence of degrees immediately appears. The red man has aptitude at imitation rather than invention; he learns easily; his natural logic is correct and discriminating, and he seizes on the nicest distinctions in comparing objects. But he is deficient in the power of imagination to combine and bring unity into his floating fancies, and in the faculty of abstraction to lift himself out of the dominion of his immediate experience. He is nearly destitute of abstract moral truth, of general principles; and, as a consequence, equalling the white man in the sagacity of the senses, and in judgments resting on them, he is inferior in reason and the moral qualities. Nor is this inferiority simply attached to the individual: it is connected with organization, and is the characteristic of the

race.

This is the inference from history. Benevolence has, everywhere in our land, exerted itself to ameliorate the condition of the Indian; above all, to educate the young. Jesuit, Franciscan, and Puritan, the church of England, the Moravian, the benevolent founders of schools, academies, and colleges, all have endeavored to change the habits of the rising generation among the Indians; and the results, in every instance, varying in the degree of influence exerted by the missionary, have varied in little else. Woman, too, with her gentleness, and the winning enthusiasm of her self-sacrificing benevolence, has attempted their instruction, and has attempted it in vain. St. Mary of the Incarnation succeeded as little as Jonathan Edwards or Brainerd. Jesuit Stephen de Carheil, revered for his genius as well as for his zeal, was for more than sixty years, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a missionary among the HuronIroquois tribes; he spoke their dialects with as much facility and elegance as though they had been his mother tongue; yet the fruits of his diligence were inconsiderable. Neither John Eliot nor Roger Williams was able to change essen

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tially the habits and character of the New England tribes. The Quakers came among the Delawares in the spirit of peace and brotherly love, and with sincerest wishes to benefit the Indian; but the Quakers succeeded no better than the Puritans, not nearly so well as the Jesuits. Brainerd awakened in the Delawares a perception of the unity of Christian morals; and yet his account of them is gloomy and desponding: "They are unspeakably indolent and slothful; they discover little gratitude; they seem to have no sentiments of generosity, benevolence, or goodness." The Moravian Loskiel could not change their character; and, like other tribes, its fragments at last migrated to the west. The condition of the little Indian communities, that are enclosed within the European settlements in Canada, in Massachusetts, in Carolina, is hardly cheering to the philanthropist. In New Hampshire and elsewhere, schools for Indian children were established; but, as they became fledged, they all escaped, refusing to be caged. Harvard College enrolls the name of an Algonkin youth among her pupils; but the college parchment could not close the gulf between the Indian character and the Anglo-American. The copper-colored men are characterized by a moral inflexibility, a rigidity of attachment to their hereditary customs and manners. The birds and the brooks, as they chime forth their unwearied canticles, chime them ever to the same ancient melodies, and the Indian child, as it grows up, displays a propensity to the habits of its ancestors.

This determinateness of moral character is marked in the organization of the American savage. He has little flexibility of features or transparency of skin; and therefore, if he depicts his passions, it is by strong contortions, or the kindling of the eye, that seems ready to burst from its socket. With rare exceptions, he cannot blush; the movement of his blood does not visibly represent the movement of his affections; for him, the domain of animated beauty is circumscribed; he cannot paint to the eye the emotions of moral sensibility.

This effect is heightened by a uniformity of intellectual culture and activity. Youth and manhood to all have but

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one character; and where villages were scattered only at wide distances in the wilderness, where marriage, interdicted indeed between members of the same family badge, was yet usually limited to people of the same tribe, ties of blood united the nation, and the purity of the race increased the uniformity of organization. Each individual was marked not so much by personal peculiarities as by the physiognomy of his tribe.

Nature in the wilderness is true to her type, and deformity is almost unknown. How rare is it to find the red man squint-eyed, or with a diseased spine, halt or blind, or with any deficiency or excess in the organs! It is not merely that, in the savage state of equality, deformity would never perpetuate itself by winning through the aid of fortune what it cannot win from love; it is not merely that among barbarians the feeble and the misshaped perish from neglect or fatigue; the most refined nation is most liable to produce varieties and to degenerate; when the habits of uncivilized simplicity have been fixed for thousands of years, the hereditary organization is safe against monstrous deviations.

This inflexibility of organization will not even yield to climate there is the same general resemblance of feature among all the aboriginal inhabitants, from the Terra del Fuego to the St. Lawrence; all have some shade of the same dull vermilion, or cinnamon, or reddish-brown, or copper color, carefully to be distinguished from the olive,the same dark and glossy hair, coarse, and never curling. They have beards, but generally of feeble growth; their eye is elongated, having an orbit inclining to a quadrangular shape; the cheek-bones are prominent; the nose is broad; the jaws project; the lips are large and thick, giv ing to the mouth an expression of indolent insensibility; the forehead, as compared with Europeans, is narrow. The facial angle of the European is assumed to be eighty-seven; that of the American, by induction from many admeasurements, is declared to be seventy-five. The mean internal capacity of the skull of the former is eighty-seven cubic inches; of the barbarous tribes of the latter, it is found to be, at least, eighty-two.

And yet the inflexibility of organization is not so absolute as to forbid hope. The color of the tribes differs in its hue; and some have been found of so fair a complexion that the blood could be seen as it mantled to the cheek: the stature and form vary, so that not only are some nations tall and slender, but in the same nation there are contrasts.

Improvement, too, has pervaded every clan in North America. The Indian of to-day excels his ancestors in skill, in power over nature, and in knowledge; the gun, the knife, and the horse, of themselves, made a revolution in his condition and the current of his ideas: that the wife of the white man is cherished as his equal has already been dimly noised about in the huts of the Comanches; the idea of the Great Spirit, who is the master of life, has reached the re mote prairies. How slowly did the condition of the common people of Europe make advances! For how many centuries did the knowledge of letters remain unknown to the peasant of Germany or France! How languidly did civilization pervade the valleys of the Pyrenees! How far is intellectual culture from having reached the peasantry of Hungary! Within the century and a half during which the Cherokees have been acquainted with Europeans, they have learned the use of the plough and the axe, of herds and flocks, of the printing-press and water-mills; they have gained a mastery over the fields, and have taught the streams to run for their benefit. And finally, in proof of progress, that nation, like the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chippewas, the Winnebagoes, and other tribes, has increased, not in intelligence only, but in numbers.

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"Whence was America peopled?" was the anxious inquiry that followed its discovery. "Whence came its trees and its grasses ? was asked, by way of excuse for indif ference. But we keep the record of the introduction of many trees and grasses; and, though this continent was peopled before it became known to history, it is yet reasonable to search after traces of connection between the nations of America and those of the Old World.

To aid this inquiry, the country east of the Mississippi has no monuments. The numerous mounds which have been

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