ments, — indeed, a perfect mass of partial and impartial guides.
It is but just that an adequate and emphatic statement should be made of the avowedly good intentions and purposes, and of the really earnest and costly schemes and efforts of the whites for the benefit of the aborigines from the very first intercourse between them. True, the insufficiency and failure of nearly all of these purposes and efforts, and the almost mocking futility of them when compared with the steady, grasping, and well-nigh exterminating progress of the whites over the continent, may seem to throw back upon these measures a character of insincerity and unreality. But it would be untrue, as well as unfair and uncharitable, so to judge. There were profound integrity, rectitude, and strong resolve in many of the professions of commiseration and intended right dealing towards the Indians. Benevolent and manly hearts have beat in tender sympathy for them. Benevolence, in its single rills and in the generous flow of its gathered contributions, has poured forth its kindly offices to them, and the sternly consecrated lives of patient and heroic men, roughened and perilled by all the dismal exigencies of the work, have been spent with the savages and for the savages, to secure for them the rights of humanity and the blessings of civilization and pure religion.
We may regard as mere empty forms the conditions and commands, looking towards the interests of the natives, introduced into the patents or charters with which the colonists from Europe were empowered to take possession of the country. We may ridicule the commissions and instructions given to governors and magistrates as to the treatment of the Indians, of which so little came in practice. The labors of philanthropists, humanitarians, and missionaries in their single efforts, or in their associated benevolent organizations, drawing bounties from all Christendom to benefit the savages, may sink into insignificance when compared
