tian warriors! wherefore did you thus
Forget the precepts of your Lord and Chief,
And lend yourselves to deeds of guilt and blood!
Did ye not know--or, knowing, did not heed--
Those solemn words of His, when death was nigh,
And He bequeathed a _legacy of "peace"_
To His disciples? "They that take the sword
Shall perish with the sword." O, well it were
If ye who left your native land, and sought
A desert for the liberty of faith,
Had acted more according to that faith,
And sought to win the souls you rashly sent
To meet their God and yours!' ANON.

Yes, well, indeed, lied it been if the settlers had been able and
willing to preserve, unbroken, the friendly relations with the Indians,
which, after the first natural distrust felt by the natives towards the
white strangers had subsided, they were, in several instances, able to
establish. But such was not the case. They received many provocations
from the natives, even from those who professed to be most friendly
towards them, and also from the settlers who followed them from the
mother-country; and they did not always meet these provocations in the
truly Christian spirit which, it must be allowed, generally pervaded
their councils, and actuated their public and private proceedings with
the wild tribes by whom they were surrounded.

Even Masasoyt--their friend and ally--was about this time nearly
estranged from them, and on the point of joining the Narragansetts in a
project for their destruction. This change in his sentiments was the
result of the machinations of Coubitant, assisted by the foolish
pretensions and love of interference which rendered Squanto almost as
dangerous as he was useful to his employers. His boasting tales about
the power of the English settlers to imprison and to let loose the
desolating plague at their will and pleasure, had been told to the
Sagamore of the Wampanoges, as well as to Coubitant and Miantonomo; and
suspicions had arisen in the breast of Masasoyt, which he vainly strove
to infuse into his more enlightened and trustworthy son, Mooanam.
Nothing that his father could say had any effect in weakening the
friendship entertained by the young Sachem, and his brother Quadequina,
towards the emigrants; and it was owing to this steady friendship that
they were made acquainted with the altered feelings of the Sagamore in
time to prevent their ripening into open hostility.

Mooanam communicated to the President the doubts and suspicions that