"If it is so, Mr. Davies," said La Salle, with a solemnity unusual with him, "our reward is sure; for the promise is, 'Thou _shalt_ find it after many days.'"
"But," said Lund, with a quiet twinkle in his sharp gray eye, "I'd like to bet five shillin' that, when you are repaid, it won't be in Indian bread."
"Pretty good!" laughed Kennedy, who had taken the day to finish up a large pile of "back numbers" of his favorite daily, "but I think hardly just to the Indians. Horace Greeley has given a great deal of thought to this Indian question, and although he would disapprove of supplying them with arms and ammunition, yet in all other matters would indorse your policy."
"You don't mean to say that Greeley would disapprove of letting poor Peter have a gun to shoot game to help support his family--do you?" asked Ben, in astonishment.
"Certainly I do. With that fifty dollars, he could have procured tools and seed, and started a farm on Indian Island. Instead of that, you give him the means of continuing a savage, instead of encouraging him to become a farmer and a civilized being. Horace Greeley would have tried--"
"To attempt an impossibility," said La Salle, excitedly. "As well may you expect to raise a draught horse from a pair of racers, or keep a flock of eagles as you would a coop of hens. The French have been the only people on this continent with an Indian policy founded in reason, and a just estimate of the character and capabilities of the aborigines."
"And yet they were completely driven from this continent," said Kennedy.
"True, sir; but their Indian policy made their scanty population of two hundred thousand Europeans a dreaded foe to the nearly three million colonists of English descent. They made of their savage allies an arm that struck secretly, swiftly, and with terrible effect, and a defence that kept actual hostilities a long distance from their main settlements. I believe, sir, that the philosophers of the future will condemn alike our policy of extermination, and the impossible attempt to mould hunters, warriors, and absolutely free men, into peaceful, plodding citizens of a republic."
"What else can be done with them?" asked Kennedy, sharply.
"It seems to me that in generations to come, it will be said of us, 'They did not try in those days to yoke the racer to the plough, nor to chain the hound to the kennel, while they urged the mastiff on the track of the deer; yet they failed to see that the Creator, and peculiar conditions unchanged for centuries, had moulded the races of men to different forms of government, modes of life, and varieties of avocation. The Roman conqueror of the world knew better than to put in his heavily-armed legions the flying Parthian, the light-armed horseman of Numidia, or the slinger of the Balearic Isles. The American of the past had at his disposal a race capable of being the skirmish line of his march of civilization to wrest a continent from the wilderness. As trappers, hunters, and guides; as fishermen and slayers of whale and seal; as the light horseman, quick, brave, self-sustaining, and self-reliant, the Indian was capable of valuable services to a people who offered him but two alternatives--extinction, or a dull, plodding, vegetative, unnatural existence.'"