the
United States. Nor is the charge that the treaties with the Indians have
been broken, of weight in itself; it depends always on the individual
case. Many of the treaties were kept by the whites and broken by the
Indians; others were broken by the whites themselves; and sometimes
those who broke them did very wrong indeed, and sometimes they did
right. No treaties, whether between civilized nations or not, can ever
be regarded as binding in perpetuity; with changing conditions,
circumstances may arise which render it not only expedient, but
imperative and honorable, to abrogate them.

Necessity of the Conquest.

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was
actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little
so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won,
for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is
indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a
course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of
mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome
thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these
continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes,
whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and
ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint
ownership. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international
morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it
would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the
standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men
who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are
not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people
who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and
indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance
of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant
lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable
to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new
land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself
misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the
Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying
American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the western miners and
cattlemen win for the us