The blackest page in our history is our treatment of the Indian. To
speak of it is a thankless task--thankless, and necessary.
This land was the Indian’s house, not ours. He was here first, nobody
knows how many centuries first. We arrived, and we shoved him, and
shoved him, and shoved him, back, and back, and back. Treaty after
treaty we made with him, and broke. We drew circles round his freedom,
smaller and smaller. We allowed him such and such territory, then took
it away and gave him less and worse in exchange. Throughout a century
our promises to him were a whole basket of scraps of paper. The other
day I saw some Indians in California. It had once been their place. All
over that region they had hunted and fished and lived according to their
desires, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We came.
To-day the hunting and fishing are restricted by our laws--not the
Indian’s--because we wasted and almost exterminated in a very short
while what had amply provided the Indian with sport and food for a very
long while.
In that region we have taken, as usual, the fertile land and the running
water, and have allotted land to the Indian where neither wood nor water
exist, no crops will grow, no human life can be supported. I have seen
the land. I have seen the Indian begging at the back door. Oh, yes, they
were an “inferior race.” Oh, yes, they didn’t and couldn’t use the land
to the best advantage, couldn’t build Broadway and the Union Pacific
Railroad, couldn’t improve real estate. If you choose to call the whole
thing “manifest destiny,” I am with you. I’ll not dispute that what
we have made this continent is of greater service to mankind than the
wilderness of the Indian ever could possibly have been--once conceding,
as you have to concede, the inevitableness of civilization. Neither you,
nor I, nor any man, can remold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we
could have behaved better to the Indian. That was in our power. And we
gave him a raw deal instead, not once, but again and again. We did it
because we could do it without risk, because he was weaker and we could
always beat him in the end. And all the while we were doing it, there
was our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, founded on
a new thing in the world, proclaiming to mankind the fairest hope
yet born, that “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights,” and that these were now to be protected by law. Ah,
no, look at it as you will, it is a black page, a raw deal. The officers
of our frontier army know all about it, because they saw it happen. They
saw the treaties broken, the thieving agents, the trespassing settlers,
the outrages that goaded the deceived Indian to despair and violence,
and when they were ordered out to kill him, they knew that he had struck
in self-defense and was the real victim.
It is too late to do much about it now. The good people of the Indian
Rights Association try to do something; but in spite of them, what
little harm can still be done is being done through dishonest Indian
agents and the mean machinery of politics. If you care to know more of
the long, bad story, there is a book by Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century
of Dishonor; it is not new. It assembles and sets forth what had been
perpetrated up to the time when it was written. A second volume could be
added now.
I have dwelt upon this matter here for a very definite reason,
closely connected with my main purpose. It’s a favorite trick of our
anti-British friends to call England a “land-grabber.” The way in which
England has grabbed land right along, all over the world, is monstrous,
they say. England has stolen what belonged to whites, and blacks, and
bronzes, and yellows, wherever she could lay her hands upon it, they
say. England is a criminal. They repeat this with great satisfaction,
this land-grabbing indictment. Most of them know little or nothing of
the facts, couldn’t tell you the history of a single case. But what
are the facts to the man who asks, “What has England done in this war,
anyway?” The word “land-grabber” has been passed to him by German
and Sinn Fein propaganda, and he merely parrots it forth. He couldn’t
discuss it at all. “Look at the Boers,” he may know enough to reply, if
you remind him that England’s land-grabbing was done a good while ago.
Well, we shall certainly look at the Boers in due time, but just now
we must look at ourselves. I suppose that the American who denounces
England for her land-grabbing has forgotten, or else has never known,
how we grabbed Florida from Spain. The pittance that we paid Spain in
one of the Florida transactions never went to her. The story is a plain
tale of land-grabbing; and there are several other plain tales that show
us to have been land-grabbers, if you will read the facts with an honest
mind. I shall not tell them here. The case of the Indian is enough in
the way of an instance. Our own hands are by no means clean. It is not
for us to denounce England as a land-grabber.
You cannot hate statistics more than I do. But at times there is no
dodging them, and this is one of the times. In 1803 we paid Napoleon
Bonaparte fifteen millions for what was then called Louisiana. Napoleon
had his title to this land from Spain. Spain had it from France. France
had it--how? She had it because La Salle, a Frenchman, sailed down the
Mississippi River. This gave him title to the land. There were people on
the bank already, long before La Salle came by.
It would have surprised them to be told that the land was no longer
theirs because a man had come by on the water. But nobody did tell them.
They were Indians. They had wives and children and wigwams and other
possessions in the land where they had always lived; but they were red,
and the man in the boat was white, and therefore they were turned into
trespassers because he had sailed by in a boat. That was the title to
Louisiana which we bought from Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Louisiana Purchase was a piece of land running up the Mississippi,
up the Missouri, over the Divide, and down the Columbia to the Pacific.
Before we acquired it, our area was over a quarter, but not half, a
million square miles. This added nearly a million square miles more. But
what had we really bought? Nothing but stolen goods. The Indians were
there before La Salle, from whose boat-sailing the title we bought was
derived. “But,” you may object, “when whites rob reds or blacks, we call
it Discovery; land-grabbing is when whites rob whites--and that is where
I blame England.” For the sake of argument I concede this, and refer you
to our acquisition of Texas. This operation followed some years after
the Florida operation. “By request” we “annexed” most of present
Texas--in 1845. That was a trick of our slaveholders. They sent people
into Texas and these people swung the deal. It was virtually a theft
from Mexico. A little while later, in 1848, we “paid” Mexico for
California, Arizona, and Nevada. But if you read the true story of
Fremont in California, and of the American plots there before the
Mexican War, to undermine the government of a friendly nation, plots
connived at in Washington with a view to getting California for
ourselves, upon my word you will find it hard to talk of England being a
land-grabber and keep a straight face. And, were a certain book to fall
into your hands, the narrative of the Alcalde of Monterey, wherein he
sets down what of Fremont’s doings in California went on before his
eyes, you would learn a story of treachery, brutality, and greed. All
this acquisition of territory, together with the Gadsden Purchase a few
years later, brought our continent to its present area--not counting
Alaska or some islands later acquired--2,970,230 square miles.
Please understand me very clearly: I am not saying that it has not been
far better for the world and for civilization that we should have become
the rulers of all this land, instead of its being ruled by the Indians
or by Spain, or by Mexico. That is not at all the point. I am merely
reminding you of the means whereby we got the land. We got it mostly by
force and fraud, by driving out of it through firearms and plots people
who certainly were there first and who were weaker than ourselves. Our
reason was simply that we wanted it and intended to have it. That is
precisely what England has done. She has by various means not one whit
better or worse than ours, acquired her possessions in various parts of
the world because they were necessary to her safety and welfare, just
as this continent was necessary to our safety and welfare. Moreover,
the pressure upon her, her necessity for self-preservation, was far more
urgent than was the pressure upon us. To make you see this, I must once
again resort to some statistics.
England’s area--herself and adjacent islands--is 120,832 square miles.
Her population in 1811 was eighteen and one half millions. At that
same time our area was 408,895 square miles, not counting the recent
Louisiana Purchase. And our population was 7,239,881. With an area less
than one third of ours (excluding the huge Louisiana) England had a
population more than twice as great. Therefore she was more crowded than
we were--how much more I leave you to figure out for yourself. I appeal
to the fair-minded American reader who only “wants to be shown,” and I
say to him, when some German or anti-British American talks to him
about what a land-grabber England has been in her time to think of these
things and to remember that our own past is tarred with the same stick.
Let every one of us bear in mind that little sentence of the Kaiser’s,
“Even now I rule supreme in the United States;” let us remember that the
Armistice and the Peace Treaty do not seem to have altered German nature
or German plans very noticeably, and don’t let us muddle our brains over
the question of the land grabbed by the great-grandfathers of present
England.
Any American who is anti-British to-day is by just so much pro-German,
is helping the trouble of the world, is keeping discord alight, is doing
his bit against human peace and human happiness.
There are some other little sentences of the Kaiser and his Huns of
which I shall speak before I finish: we must now take up the controversy
of those men in front of the bulletin board; we must investigate what
lies behind that controversy. Those two men are types. One had learned
nothing since he left school, the other had.