beautiful exceptions, which we shall have the greatest pleasure in pointing out, no more regard has been paid to the rights or the feelings of the North American Indians by the English and their descendants, than was paid to the South Americans by the Spanish and Portuguese.
Every reader of history is aware of the melancholy and disastrous commencement of most of our American colonies. The great cause was that they were founded in injustice. Adventurers, with charters from the English monarch in their pockets, as the Spaniards and Portuguese had the Pope's bull in theirs, landed on the coast of America and claimed it for their own, reckoning the native inhabitants of no more account than the bears and fallow-deer of the woods. They had got a grant of the country from their own king; but whence had he got his grant? That is not quite so clear. The Pope's claim is intelligible enough: he was, in his own opinion, God's viceroy and steward, and disposed of his world in that character; but the Bible was the English monarch's law, and where did the Bible appoint Elizabeth or James God's steward? Where did it appoint either of them "a judge and a ruler over" the Indians? Truly Elizabeth, with all her vaunting, had read her Bible to little purpose, as we fear most monarchs and their ministers to the present hour have done. We must say of the greater part of North America, as Erskine said of India—"it is a country which God never gave us, and acquired by means that he will never justify."
The misery attending the first planting of our colonies in America was equal to the badness of our principles. The very first thing which the colonists in the
