High-minded, pouring out their own disgrace.
Thy prophets speak of such; and, noting down
The features of the last degenerate times,
Exhibit every lineament of these.
Come then, and added to thy many crowns,
Receive one yet, as radiant as the rest,
Due to thy last and most effectual work,
Thy word fulfilled, the conquest of a world.
Cowper—The Task.
We have now followed the Europeans to every region of the globe, and seen them planting colonies, and peopling new lands, and everywhere we have found them the same—a lawless and domineering race, seizing on the earth as if they were the firstborn of creation, and having a presumptive right to murder and dispossess all other people. For more than three centuries we have glanced back at them in their course, and everywhere they have had the word of God in their mouth, and the deeds of darkness in their hands. In the first dawn of discovery, forth they went singing the Te Deum, and declaring that they went to plant the cross amongst the heathen. As we have already observed, however, it turned out to be the cross of one of the two thieves, and a bitter cross of crucifixion it has proved to the natives where they have received it. It has stood the perpetual sign of plunder and extermination. The Spaniards were reckless in their carnage of the Indians, and all succeeding generations have expressed their horror of the Spaniards. The Dutch were cruel, and everybody abominated their cruelty. One would have thought that the world was grown merciful. Behold North America at this moment, with its disinherited Indians! See Hindustan, that great and swarming region of usurpations and exactions! Look at the Cape, and ask the Caffres whether the English are tender-hearted and just: ask the same question in New Holland: ask it of the natives of Van Dieman’s Land,—men, transported from the island of their fathers. Ask the New Zealanders whether the warriors whose tattooed heads stare us in the face in our museums, were not delicately treated by us. Go, indeed, into any one spot, of any quarter of the world, and ask—no you need not ask, you shall hear of our aggressions from every people that know us. The words of Red-Jacket will find an echo in the hearts of tens of millions of sorrowful and expatriated and enthralled beings, who will exclaim, “you want more land!—you want our country!” It is needless to tell those who have read this history that there is, and can be, nothing else like it in the whole record of mortal crimes. Many are the evils that are done under the sun; but there is and can be no evil like that monstrous and earth-encompassing evil, which the Europeans have committed against the Aborigines of every country in which they have settled. And in what country have they not settled? It is often said as a very pretty speech—that the sun never sets on the dominions of our youthful Queen; but who dares to tell us the far more horrible truth, that it never sets on the scenes of our injustice and oppressions! When we have taken a solemn review of the astounding transactions recorded in this volume, and then add to them the crimes against humanity committed in the slave-trade and slavery, the account of our enormities is complete; and there is no sum of wickedness and bloodshed—however vast, however monstrous, however enduring it may be—which can be pointed out, from the first hour of creation, to be compared for a moment with it.