Who were the savages? and how did the English expect the Indians, under such a course of tuition, to become civilized? This was the state of things in the south. In the north, not a war broke out between England and France, but the same scenes were acting between the English American settlements and Canada. In 1692 we find Captain Ingoldsby haranguing the chiefs of the Five Nations at Albany, and exhorting them to "keep the enemy in perpetual alarm by the incursions of parties into their country." And the Indian orator shrewdly replying—"Brother Corlear (their name for the governor of New York) is it not to secure your frontiers? Why, then, not one word of your people that are to join us? We will carry the war into the heart of the enemy's country—but, brother Corlear, how comes it that none of our brethren, fastened in the same chain with us, offer their hand in this general war? Pray, Corlear, how come Maryland, Delaware River, and New England to be disengaged? Do they draw their arms out of the chain? or has the great king commanded that the few subjects he has in this place should make war against the French alone?"[1]
It was not always, however, that the Indians had to complain that the English urged them into slaughter of the French and did not accompany them. The object of England in America now became that of wresting Canada entirely from France. For this purpose, knowing how essential it was to the success of this enterprise that they should not only have the Indians well affected, so as to prevent any incursions of the French Indians into their own states while the
- ↑ Colden, i. 148.
