and effective allies of the French, and all their territory besides. It was in asserting that claim and in the attempt to take possession of such territory that England provoked one of the most ferocious and tragic of the episodes in our Indian warfare, known as the Conspiracy of Pontiac. Next, she engaged the aid of Indian allies against us in our War of Independence, making a contract with them for their services, the terms of which she violated. Great Britain appears again on the field against us, acting through her governor and agents in Canada, and such able Indian conspirators as the Mohawk chief Brant and Little Turtle. Her scheme then was, while holding the Northern and Western “posts,” which she had agreed to give up to us, to prompt and aid the Indians west and north of the Ohio to the conspiracy, on the ground that the territory which she had ceded to us by treaty did not include that into which our pioneers began to rush on the conclusion of peace. The immense cost which this renewed Indian war involved to our then merely confederated government, — impoverished, and with distracted councils, — and the barbarities of slaughter and burnings and desolation which it involved for the settlers, might well have persuaded the generation of that day that the British and the Indians constituted but one common enemy for us, and that our victory included the conquest of the territory over which the direful struggle extended. At any rate, such is our title to that territory held according to the allowed principles of natural and international law.
So we close our review of the subject of the Indian tenure of land on this continent as recognized and dealt with by Europeans. There has been no harmony or consistency either of opinion or action on the subject. According to that law of honesty and economy which teaches us that the righting of a wrong, when that is even possible, involves much heavier costs than would have been requisite to avoid it, our Government both in its war policy and its
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