Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/647

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PATIENT AND PERSISTENT EFFORTS.
627

sense of being a degraded caste, but they feel it when in the settlements. This mixture of the races, with the blending of some of the least noble and some of the most perverse traits of each, is found to introduce among the Indian tribes of the more remote places, and who have shared the least in amicable relations with the whites, influences unfavorable to civilization. But, on the whole, it is probably safe to judge that this mixture of the races presents conditions which, as favorable or unfavorable to our future pacificatory relations with such tribes, balance each other. Very slow and very gradual, with many baitings, arrests, and drawbacks, must be the stages of release from the ways of barbarism, and the advance of the Indians to the acquired habits of self-dependence on their own abounding resources. It is a mediatorial work between the white man and the red man. Patience, friendliness, help in all its ingenuities of method and service, with a firm and overawing power in reserve, must not only be the agencies to promote, but also the authority and the force to insist upon, the extinction of savagery and the steady progress of civilization. For reasonable periods there will be no objection to bringing the Indians into such a condition as will render it indispensable for them to need the white man's resources and help. But a view should always be had to a critical time when the Indians, realizing how essential these appliances are to them, shall be made to understand that if these resources are within their own reach by the simple use of forethought and industry, they must henceforth draw them from the earth and not from the national treasury. It will require no effort and no justification from us to steel our hearts against the importunities of those who are wilfully thriftless and lazy.

My principal aim in this volume has been to trace out and illustrate a statement made in an early page of it, that the relations between European invaders and colonists with the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent have, from the