I do not blame them. They are as God made them, and man left them; for, I suppose, their forebears—somewhere afar off in Asia, perhaps, in the dim, immemorial ages—had all passed through the various phases of the civilization of their time, and that they did not grow out of the tail of any gorilla. It is not for profane man to inquire what possible reason there could be for the perpetuation—let alone the creation—of such a useless, bootless race. There they are, occupiers of the soil for unknown centuries—before the white man ever saw their faces—many thousands of them still squatting there, cleaving, like bereaved Autochthons, to the bosom of the dear old mother who had whelped and so long nurtured them; and trying to make themselves believe that they are still masters of the continent.
What they were made for at all, I do not pretend to divine. The Divine Maker of all knows best, and what He does is its own justification—satisfying the wellnigh insatiable cry of the universe for universal justice. They are the saurians of humanity; and it is remarkable that the idea of 'progressive development'—if I may be pardoned for making use of a term in modern philosophy about which there has been so much assumption and canting—it is remarkable that this idea, which the name of saurian suggests, should run through all nature, and be embodied in her finest forms and intelligences. There is a considerable distance between the saurian and good Master Adam, the gardener of Eden; but it seems to me, after all, that this brutal, foul, obscene monster of the prime, was only Adam in the making. He came after him, a long way, at all events; and if geology had been fashionable in his time, and he a savant, he might have chalked out for himself a very fine pedigree.
For this strange, eccentric Nature, who meant man from the beginning, and failed to realize her ideal because of those horrible nightmare dreams of which these saurians, mastodons, mammoths were the visible representatives, did, nevertheless, make, in every succeeding world (for every crust of this planet is the crust of a dead world), higher and higher organizations—until, at last, she gave to man his inscrutable birth!
That was, no doubt, a great triumph of power and genius! Man is a noble animal, the finest of all living fellows! et cetera! et cetera! But what sort of a fellow was he when he came, in his spindles and shacklebones, from the womb of the All-mother? Was he a Caucasian, or a Mongolian, a Negro, a Malay, or a Bosjesman?—this last being an effigy of man so abominable that no race that I have heard of will include him even as a lodger in the parish settlements!
Mark! what a sameness, and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us men out of our mothers, but babes—helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless babes!—ignorant; who must grow into the perfect stature and the mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way? Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law of nature is progress. It is often, nay, always, a very slow thing—but how sure! how inevitable! how beneficent in its results! She never makes worse after bad—and those weird opium monsters of the foreworlds were unspeakably bad!—but always she makes of bad better; and of better she has made her best, at present. In the light of this law, were any one mad enough to grope, he might come to the conclusion that the first man (or race of men) was anything but a grandee in mind, person, or estate; and that our seemingly puzzled but at last most wonder-working mother, ycleped Nature, made some very ugly attempts at man before she reached the climax of her imagination and her power as it obtains in the man Caucasian!
I regard all the colored races—and with no malice or evil of any sort in my heart toward them—as first experiments in the gamut of human creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my consciousness—let alone my active intellect—the belief that these were the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown modern Indian! It is an old face, as if the accumulated wrinkles of, not 'forty,' but a hundred 'centuries' had ploughed their marks there. They seem to belong to the dawn of time; while our Caucasian man is ever young and beautiful, the born master of all things.
We must deal with races according to their faculty, and credit them according to their faculty. If we fail, we fail in wisdom—and in prudence, which is a valuable attribute of wisdom. Expect not grapes from thistles! Expect no virtue—unless it relates to his own selfishness or his own tribe—from an Indian, or from very many other men!
It must not be forgotten, however, that Indians are people who, to say the least of them, are fashioned in the likeness of men. Here, as elsewhere, Nature sticks to her old plan, and will not budge an inch. In the chart of the Indian's nature are mapped out the same feelings, instincts, passions, the same organs and dimensions as belong to the highest race, or the highest race of the mixed races. She will have no nonsense about her red children, nor about her black. There they are, as she (for purposes of her own, not particularly clear) intended them to be—men, alive, oh!—not descendants of Monboddo's ape, nor of Du Chaillu's gorilla, but men proper and absolute! with their duties, responsibilities, and destinies.
Seeing, therefore, that the Indian (our American Indian, with whom we have now to do) has all the faculties—however defaced and blurred by long centuries of bloody crimes, which they regard not as crimes, but as virtues—seeing that these red, thriftless, bloody-minded Indians have all the human faculties intact—although, it may be, not so bright as those of some of our own people who call themselves Americans—is it not possible that by fair and manly dealing with them, by a just trade, and conscientious regard for the sanctity of treaty rights and obligations—that you, whom it may more particularly concern, might so win their good will as to make them friends instead of enemies? The devil that lies at the bottom of all savage natures is easily roused, not at all so easily laid again, and as easily kept in his own place. Indians are not incapable of friendship, nor of good faith, although the best require a great deal of looking after—and close looking, too! But what I want to urge is this: that if you always appeal to the worst passions of the redskin, rob him of his rights and property, cheat him by false promises, deceive him at all hands, and then mock him when he knocks at your door for credit or charity, that he and his may live, you cannot much wonder if, obeying his traditions, his religion, and the dictates of his savage nature—now maddened into fury and reckless of consequences—he indulges in the frightful havoc, the relentless murders and burnings, which have so lately marked his trail in Minnesota.
Let no one suppose for a moment, from what I have now said, that I design to offer any apology, any excuse for the nameless and unpunishable crimes which these miscreants have perpetrated. I have no pity and no compassion for them, and surely no word either which I desire should be construed, in this respect, to their favor. I go with the old Scotch judge—a rigid Antinomian! who, having tried and convicted a Calvinist as rigid as himself, asked him what he had to say why the sentence of the law should not be pronounced against him.