which the Indians had suffered from the settlers that made them so ready to take up the tomahawk and scalping-knife at the call, and induced by the blood-money, of the mother-country against her American children. The employment and instigation of the Indians to tomahawk the settlers brings down British treatment of the Indians to the very last moment of our power in that country. What were our notions of such enormities may be inferred from their being called in the British Parliament "means which God and nature have put into our hands,"—and from Lord Cornwallis, our general then employed against the Americans, expressing, in 1780, his "satisfaction that the Indians had pursued and scalped many of the enemy!"
This was our conduct towards the Indians to the last hour of our dominion in their country. We drove them out of their lands, or cheated them out of them by making them drunk. We robbed them of their furs in the same manner; and on all occasions we inflamed their passions against their own enemies and ours. We made them ten times more cruel, perfidious, and depravedly savage than we found them, and then upbraided them as irreclaimable and merciless, and thereon founded our convenient plea that they must be destroyed, or driven onward as perishing shadows before the sun of civilization.
Before quitting the English in America, we need only, to complete our view of their treatment of the natives, to include in it a glance at that treatment in those colonies which we yet retain there; and that is furnished by the following Parliamentary Report, (1837.)
