tries have them yet. Every country, sooner or later, has its civilized races, — sometimes historically known to be immigrant ones, sometimes presumably of an equal antiquity of location to the wild ones near them. Mexico is a case in point. The conqistadóres found in that country an ancient, highly developed, apparentlyindigenous civilization, with a most complex system of government and taxation, an established state-religion, a thorough organization of classes, an elaborate school of manners and etiquette, — a civilization in some respects superior to their own; and in the same country wild, nearly naked savage tribes, equally indigenous, — the Apaches of then and to-day. Time, soil, climate, naturalresources, had been equal to them all, and behold the difference of result! It was a case of indigènes capable of self-development and not capable. . . . Savagery is civilization's childhood.”
These kindly and generous and paradoxical, if also
enthusiastic, estimates of the average North American savage
may fairly be quoted and emphasized, because they are so
rare in our voluminous Indian literature. Of quite
another tone and strain is the vast bulk of all that has been
written about the natives, — certainly by the pens of
Englishmen from their first contact here. With a vague intent
to regard the savages pitifully and to treat them kindly,
our ancestors here — very soon, and largely through their
own misdealing, and for the rest under the stress of
circumstances — came to hate and loathe the Indian, and to
view him and to speak of him as a most hideous and
degraded creature. The Indian was to them “the scum
of humanity,” “the offscouring of the earth.” When the
savage who bore the title of King Philip, and who planned
and led the most devastating — well-nigh exterminating —
war ever waged between the white and red men on our soil,
was drawn out of the miry swamp in which he had been
slain, Captain Church, his conqueror, said, “He was a doleful
great naked, dirty beast.” This, too, of an Indian
monarch! And yet it was of a neighbor chieftain, Iyanough, of
the same race, — from whom the town of Hyannis takes its
name, and whose bones are preserved in a cabinet in the