like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others, for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation."
Vattel gives this opinion: "When a Native finds a country uninhabited, and without a master, he may lawfully seize upon the same. The law of nations, then, will recognise the proprietary right and the sovereignty of a Native over only uninhabited countries, which it shall have occupied really, and, in fact, in which it shall have formed A settlement." Then, as concerning the Aborigines, he goes on to say: "Since men are naturally equal, and that their rights and obligations are the same, as coming equally from nature, nations composed of men, and considered as so many free persons who live together in a state of nature, are naturally equal and hold from nature the same obligations and the same rights. Neither strength nor weakness produces, in this respect, any difference."
Voltaire, when speaking of the struggle in America for supremacy between the French and English, sarcastically concludes: "They had quite made up their minds in one point, viz. that the Natives had no right at all to the land in question." Thus Buchan declares that "the colonists and the Natives are necessarily brought into painful collision at the very outset; the one seeks to obtain possession of the lands secured to them by Act of Parliament, the other to keep possession of those very lands which are theirs by a prior right."
William Penn, who purchased a right from the Indians, was able to add these memorable words in his treaty: "And if anything shall offend you or your people, you shall have a full and speedy satisfaction for the same by an equal number of just men on both sides, that by no means you may have just occasion of being offended against them." He who had treated them as men, equal in natural rights, when dealing for land, could afford to recognise their citizen rights under a common government.
An old Delaware Indian Sachem spoke conclusively in relation to the quarrel between the English and French: "The French claim all the land on one side of the Ohio, the English claim all the land on the other side,—now where does the Indians' land lie?" Another chief thus addressed the French envoys: "The land belongs to neither of you. The Great Being allotted it to us as a residence. So, fathers, I desire you, as I have desired
