full occasion to note, in our own colonial war with Great Britain the same crushing power of fate did not make the Indians umpires in the struggle, but simply victims. We give full credit to the natives, if not for skill, yet for ability, cunning, and ferocity, in the great art of warfare before they had known any white foes. But it seems as if they must have learned something from their training under their new enemies. They certainly did learn that they had no monopoly of that class of passions which infuriate combatants and inspire guile, treachery, and breaches of the most solemn covenants. In the Old World, in the most embittered wars between Christians, some arrests and recognitions of what stood for humanity were coming to assert themselves as promising to introduce rules for what is called civilized warfare. Such rules have never yet crossed the sea to be of service to our natives.
We pause at this point in the rehearsal of only painful and shocking deeds, to reflect upon a fact which must forcibly present itself to one who, in reviewing the strife of European nationalities on this continent, contemplates the distribution of the awards from it.
The pages of human history and fortunes on the scenes of this distracted world present to us many conclusions and results in the struggles for the greater prizes of empire which violate our highest conceptions of right, our judgment of what ought to have been. And perhaps the most signal instance of the seemingly inequitable disposal of the great issues of policy among nations is the significant fact, that France, either as empire or republic, has not now any territorial foothold on this continent; nor indeed any memorial of her old colonial enterprise and sway, save in the names borne by lakes and rivers, forts and missions, cataracts and portages, in the regions of her wilderness heroism, and in the mixture of her blood and lineage in the descendants of nearly every aboriginal tribe. The allotments of fortune, or the fatuity of destiny, or the arbitrament of treaties built upon
