ed ethics,
the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was
necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of
civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable.
Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or
immorality of such conquests. But these arguments appeal chiefly to the
cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish
nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands. Such
conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring
adventurers who shape and guide each race's territorial growth. They are
sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime,
finds itself face to face with a weaker and wholly alien race which
holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as
necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after
effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for
mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and
conquered peoples. It is useless to try to generalize about conquests
simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged
by itself. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic
conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian
have always proved a curse in the end. Nothing but sheer evil has come
from the victories of Turk and Tartar. This is true generally of the
victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more
moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their
shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues. Yet it remains
no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very
little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not
been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples
as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races
who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or
displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or
conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of
hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should
of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs
of a new and vigorous people. That they are in truth birth-pangs does
not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the