Democracy in America (Hackett Classics) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Published: 2000-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Present State and the Probable Future of the Indian

Tribes That Inhabit the Territory Possessed by the Union

• • •

• • • [354]

From whatever side one considers the fate of the natives of North America, one sees only irremediable evils: if they remain savage, we drive them before us on our march; if they try to become civilized, the contact with men more civilized than they delivers them over to oppression and misery. If they continue to wander from wilderness to wilderness, they perish; if they try to settle somewhere, they perish anyway. They can become enlightened only with the help of the Europeans, and the approach of the Europeans corrupts them and drives them back toward barbarism. As long as they are left in their solitary expanses, they refuse to change their mores, and when they are finally constrained to try, there is no longer time to do it.

The Spanish loose their dogs on the Indians as on savage beasts; they pillage the New World like a city taken by assault, without discrimination and without pity. But one cannot destroy everything; furor has a limit: the remnant of the Indian populations that escaped the massacres ends up becoming mixed with its conquerors and adopting their religion and their mores.28

The conduct of the Americans of the United States toward the natives exudes on the contrary the purest love of forms and of legality. Provided that the Indians remain in the savage state, the Americans do not interfere in their affairs and treat them as independent peoples; they do not permit themselves to occupy their lands without having duly acquired them by means of a contract; and if by chance an Indian nation can no longer live on its land, they take them fraternally by the hand and lead them to die far from the country of their forefathers.

[355] The Spanish, by means of unprecedented monstrosities, covering themselves with an indelible shame, were not able to succeed in exterminating the Indian race nor even in preventing them from sharing their rights. The Americans of the United States attained this double result with a marvelous facility, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is not possible to destroy men while respecting better the laws of humanity.

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