utants of the title of the newcomers to the land.

The country had to be won from its original owners step by step, not by
one or many blows; the process of reclamation was by a steady pushing
back of the aborigines, not by a conquest such as that of Norman over
Saxon or even Englishman over Maori. There was no conquered race to
become eventually amalgamated with its conquerors; the history of all
the first period of settlement is the history of civilization driving
barbarism before it as it marched on. But for such methods there was
need of a somewhat peculiar and very strenuous civilization; the desired
result was not to be won by any graces or abstractions, but by the
prevailing of white stamina, bravery, and ingenuity over red cunning and
tradition and honesty--of the axe over the tomahawk, of the rifle over
the bow. It was the triumph of the knowledge rather than the principles
belonging to a higher culture than that which was going down; it was
Friar Bacon with his gunpowder, not Francis Bacon with his learning, who
was fighting the battle of the white against the red, and was affecting
the progress of the world.

In conditions arising from strife woman has but little place. She may
indeed be present, and even be a part of the conditions which are
inevitable in times of conquest; but she is there only as an accident,
not as a requisite. The elimination of the influence of woman from the
trend of present civilization would be fatal to all approach to any
worthy goal; but in the time of the beginnings of our country's story
woman was a hindrance rather than a help to progress, since by her
presence and the consequent anxiety and by her weakness in physical
prowess she enfeebled the fighting powers of the garrison or village.
Even so, she had her part, and an honorable one, in the events which
established white dominance in America; but it was one that was
necessarily subordinate in the eyes of the chroniclers of those times,
and so we hear but little of women in the flush of our country's dawn.
It is not to be questioned that in the first colonies planted by England
in the New World there were women--perhaps nearly as many as men. We are
apt to forget, by the way, that Virginia was originally settled by the
Spaniards under Menendez, the perpetrator of the terrible massacre in
Florida by which his name is best remembered, and that the Latin races,
both Spanish and French, long anticipated the English in colonization