soldiers and their families, and of communities living but little more than a score of miles from Boston, when the Indians goaded and led on by their Jesuit priests and the French from Canada brought devastation and massacre on so many of our frontier settlements.
The wounds of those days of agony and torture are healed. The dismay and exasperation, the rage and deeply implanted hate which fired them have cooled. The Indian has passed from our sight and range. We know him only in story, or as our daily papers tell us of distant encounters with wasting tribes, and puzzle us with confused pleadings and reproaches as to the right and wrong of each fresh outburst. He would have been a hero in nerve, and a saint or a fool in spirit or judgment, who a little more than a hundred years ago had advocated the peace policy amid the border settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia, when, goaded by the master-purpose and plan of Pontiac, the region between the Alleghanies and the Ohio Valley was the scene of the most dire carnage, desolation, and horror; when a thousand scattered households were destroyed with all the atrocities of savage warfare, and two thousand men, women, and children suffered all the ingenuities of mutilation and torture. It does not surprise us to read that even the peace policy of the Friends, under which they had lived for more than sixty years generally so amicably with the Indians, should have yielded — some think ludicrously, others think contemptibly — under the strain and agony of that bitter crisis for humanity. In its earlier stages that frontier havoc by the infuriated league of savages hardly disturbed the tranquillity of the thrifty Quakers in Philadelphia. It was charged that their pity and sympathy for the Indians exceeded their regard for the scattered settlers on their frontiers, principally Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who had all become victims or fugitives. The Friends, too, had a controlling influence in their provincial Assembly. When,
