the Seven Reductions of Paraguay, addressed to the expelling Spaniards and Portuguese. In each case it was alike unavailing. The Congress returned them a cool answer, advising the Cherokees to go over the Mississippi, where "the soil should be theirs while the trees grow, or the streams run." But they had heard that language before, and they knew its value. The State of Georgia had avowed the doctrine of conquest, which silences all contracts and annuls all promises. It is to the honour of the Supreme Court of the United States that, on appeal to it, it annulled the proceedings of Georgia, and recognised the rightful possession of the country by the Cherokees. But what power shall restrain all those engines of irritation and oppression, which white men know how to employ against coloured ones, when they want their persons or their lands. Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation—the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Whenever we hear now of those tribes, it is of some fresh act of aggression against them—some fresh expulsion of a portion of them—and of melancholy Indians moving off towards the western wilds.
Such is the condition to which the British and their descendants have reduced the aboriginal inhabitants of the vast regions of North America,—the finest race of men that we have ever designated by the name of savage.
What term we savage? The untutored heart
Of Nature's child is but a slumbering fire;
Prompt at a breath, or passing touch to start
Into quick flame, as quickly to retire;
