d become farmers, or merchants, or plumbers, or firemen, or
carpenters, or whatever, and read little but the morning paper for the
rest of their lives?

The blackest page in our history would take a long while to read. Not a
word of it did I ever see in my school textbooks. They were written on
the plan that America could do no wrong. I repeat that, just as we love
our friends in spite of their faults, and all the more intelligently
because we know these faults, so our love of our country would be just
as strong, and far more intelligent, were we honestly and wisely taught
in our early years those acts and policies of hers wherein she fell
below her lofty and humane ideals. Her character and her record on the
whole from the beginning are fine enough to allow the shadows to throw
the sunlight into relief. To have produced at three stages of our
growth three such men as Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, is quite
sufficient justification for our existence

Chapter VII: Tarred with the Same Stick

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, could