n'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 kno