When the child is grown she will consider it basely ungrateful
not to love her, as it certainly will not; and this will be cited as an
instance of the impossibility of attaching the Indian.
Whether the Indian could, by any efforts of love and intelligence from
the white man, have been civilized and made a valuable ingredient in the
new state, I will not say; but this we are sure of; the French
Catholics, at least, did not harm them, nor disturb their minds merely
to corrupt them. The French they loved. But the stern Presbyterian, with
his dogmas and his task-work, the city circle and the college, with
their niggard concessions and unfeeling stare, have never tried the
experiment. It has not been tried. Our people and our government have
sinned alike against the first-born of the soil, and if they are the
fated agents of a new era, they have done nothing--have invoked no god
to keep them sinless while they do the hest of fate.
Worst of all, when they invoke the holy power only to mask their
iniquity; when the felon trader, who, all the week, has been besotting
and degrading the Indian with rum mixed with red pepper, and damaged
tobacco, kneels with him on Sunday before a common altar, to tell the
rosary which recalls the thought of him crucified for love of suffering
men, and to listen to sermons in praise of "purity"!!
My savage friends, cries the old fat priest, you must, above all things,
aim at _purity_.
Oh, my heart swelled when I saw them in a Christian church.
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