"They have stuck fast to us for a long time, and would not go from us without cause. If they could help to keep us great and powerful they would, and I don't think a little adversity would make them turn. But to see us whipped and scalped would make them think a good deal, and they won't stay long by a people they don't respect.
"They have got their own notions, too, about faith and want of faith. If you are quite friendly with them--altogether--out and out--they'll hold fast enough to their word with you; but a very little turning, or shaking, or doubting, will make them think themselves free from all engagements; and then take care of your scalp-lock. If I am quite sure, when I meet an Indian, that, as the good Book says, 'my heart is right with his heart;' that I have never cheated him, or thought of cheating him; that I have not doubted him, nor do doubt him--I can lie down and sleep in his lodge as safe as if I was in the heart of Albany. But I should not sleep a wink if I knew there was the least little bit of insincerity in my own heart; for they are as 'cute as serpents, and they are not people to wait for explanations. Put your wit against theirs at the back of the forest, and you'll get the worse of it."
"But have we cheated, or attempted to cheat, these poor people?" asked the stranger.
"Why, the less we say about that the better, major," replied Woodchuck, shaking his head. "They have had to bear a good deal; and now when the time comes that we look as if we were going to the wall, perhaps they may remember it."
"But I hope and trust we are not exactly going to the wall," pursued the other, with his colour somewhat heightened; "there has been a great deal said in England about mismanagement of our affairs on this continent; but I have always thought, being no very violent politician myself, that party spirit dictated criticisms which were probably unjust."
"There has been mismanagement enough, major," replied Woodchuck; "hasn't there, Prevost?"
"I fear so, indeed," replied his host with a sigh; "but quite as much on the part of the colonial authorities as on that of the government at home."
"And whose fault is that?" demanded Woodchuck, somewhat warmly; "why, that of the government at home too! Why do they appoint incompetent men? Why do they appoint ignorant men? Why do they exclude from every office of honour, trust, or emolument the good men of the provinces, who know the situation and the wants and the habits of the provinces, and put over us men who, if they were the best men in the world, would be inferior, from want of experience, to our own people, but who are nothing more than a set of presuming, ignorant, grasping blood-suckers, who are chosen because they are related to a minister, or a minister's mistress, or perhaps his valet, and whose only object is to make as much out of us as they can, and then get back again. I do not say that they are all so, but a great many of them are; and this is an insult and an injury to us."
He spoke evidently with a good deal of heat; but his feelings were those of a vast multitude of the American colonists, and those feelings were preparing the way for a great revolution.
"Come, come, Woodchuck," exclaimed Walter Prevost with a laugh, "you are growing warm; and when you are angry, you bite. The major wants to hear your notions of the state of the English power here, and not your censure of the king's government."