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and distrust the establishment of New Haven; to have been watchful and suspicious, and to have raised a force to repel invasion or to seek a pretext to use it for aggression. In all the history of the colonies that attempt was never made, and Englishmen who had established settlement or colony had nothing to fear from men of their own blood; nor did they live in constant apprehension of having to yield their independence to satisfy the rapacity of conscienceless adventurers or the ambition of selfconstituted rulers.

With the settlement of Connecticut begins the long chapter of Indian warfare that raged throughout the seventeenth century and was closed late in the next only when the red man had been practically exterminated and the superior skill and resources of the white man overmatched the cunning and fanaticism of the savage.

The Indian has been one of the subordinate causes to influence American civilization, not by grafting his own civilization on that of the English, not because the English absorbed him, his customs, language, or religion; not because the Indian in the smallest degree swayed an unyielding and firmly established civilization; but because Indian warfare and the necessity of subduing the Indian to clear the way for the invading white man left its lasting mark on the character of the colonists. Two great barriers challenged the Englishman; the wilderness and the Indians. In New England as well as in

the South, later when there was that response to the imperious call of the West, the ground was contested by the aborigines, who resisted the despoiler to the end. Slowly civilization drove back savagery, wresting from it its inheritance, paying in full in blood; and men were made keen and became hardened by the conflict; they were made cruel by contact with a foe whose warfare exacted vengeance to the last drop.

The Indian wars kept alive the military spirit and while the Americans are not a warlike people, in them the military spirit is highly developed — they made the pioneer and settler live in the fear of surprise and always ready to resist it; it deprived them of that sense of security that might have sunk them in sloth and brought contentment in isolation. Had there been no Indians, the Americans might easily have become a pastoral and agricultural people, physically soft, unsuspicious, fonder of the gentle arts than the ruder struggle of commerce. The Indian hardened the body of the American by making him a soldier, as from youth up he was accustomed to firearms, and at church and in the field his musket was always by his side. It produced that extraordinary military initiative and resource that was the admiration and amazement of European military critics, that made it possible for men in the ranks to rise to command, that made a standing army unnecessary. The readiness with which Americans in their early days took to the field was the result of this training, and the tactics

which the Indian had taught them they used against men of their own race. The Indian sharpened the wits of the white man because the cunning of the savage was superior to the slow-moving mind of the Englishman; he taught his own love of cruelty and delight in suffering.

There are to be found American apologists for the American treatment of the Indian; and perhaps these apologies are not without warrant, and we read with horror accounts of massacre, rapine, and torture; the white man no less cruel and merciless than the Indian. But Englishmen were confronting a foe who knew no mercy, and to whom the generosity of the victor in the hour of triumph was interpreted not as the mercy of the strong but the fear of the weak; a foe that understood only the meaning of reprisal; whose respect for their enemy increased the more he imitated their own methods and exacted life for life and tortured and destroyed even as they did. "Often the white men and red fought one another wherever they met, and displayed in their conflict all the cunning and merciless ferocity that made warfare so dreadful. Terrible deeds of prowess were done by the mighty men on either side. It was a war of stealth and cruelty, and ceaseless, sleepless watchfulness. The contestants had sinewy frames and iron wills, keen eyes and steady hands, hearts as bold as they were ruthless." Men on the frontier lived from month to

1 Roosevelt: The Winning of the West, vol. i, p. 191.

month and year to year under the terror which at length taught them to regard their enemies as wild beasts.1

A higher civilization was opposed to a lower, a rudimentary race sought to interpose an obstacle to the spread of a race highly developed. It was inevitable that the conflict should come and civilization win the mastery. It was not ethical, perhaps, but it was inexorable.

1 Doyle: English Colonies in America, vol. iii, p. 348.

CHAPTER XX

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS BORN

IN the hagiology of each nation, says Emerson, the lawgiver was in each case a man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy brought him face to face with the extremes of society. In the hagiology of Rhode Island we have the lawgiver of eloquent tongue, a man of such ardent sympathy that he was able to envisage the future, who gathered around him the extremes of society as society manifested itself through its religious views; a man half mystic but yet extremely practical, whose liberality made him far in advance of his time, but who was able to draw the line between liberty and license. The name of Roger Williams is inseparably associated with Rhode Island, and it vividly recalls the narrow formalism of the Puritan, his intense intolerance and the methods he employed to root out any attempt to challenge the supremacy of the theocracy.

There came to Massachusetts in 1631 "the founder of a new state, the exponent of a new philosophy, the intellect that was to harmonize religious differences, and soothe the sectarian asperities of the New World; a man whose clearness of mind enabled him to deduce, from the mass of crude speculations which abounded in the seven

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