elentless and untamable ferocity and a
homicidal frenzy. From the calm and exhaustive analysis of the
philosophy of his theme, as well as from the tragic story which fills
his thrilling pages, it is evident that Mr. Parkman traces to the nature
and circumstances of the savage himself the prime causes of his
extermination. Independently of the white man's agency,--saving only the
sale of guns by the Dutch traders at Albany to the Iroquois,--the decay
of the Indian tribes is to be ascribed to their own incapacity for
civilization, and to their own homicidal passion. One might as well
expect to neutralize the game flavor in the deer or the sea-fowl, as to
bring an Indian tribe under the conditions of what we call culture and
civilization. Mr. Everett, in his address in commemoration of the
massacre at Bloody Brook, near Deerfield, Massachusetts, vindicated the
general course of the white men towards the aborigines of these regions,
by claiming for it an accordance with the manifest will of Providence
from an economical point of view. The Indian was a wasteful, wretched,
improvident consumer and spoiler of the means of subsistence and
enjoyment for communities of civilized men. So reckless and ruthless was
he, so idle and thriftless, that he required for his precarious and
beastly subsistence a domain which would furnish cities with all their
comforts and luxuries. A thousand white men might subsist in comfort
through the whole year where five Indians could find but enough with
which to gorge themselves for a small part of the year, while for the
rest of it they suffered for lack of food, fire, and shelter.

Undeniable, also, is the fact that, according to the measure of what
represented Christianity to themselves, and the form and degree of
benefit which they personally by experience derived from it, the
earliest European comers labored sincerely, and at cost, to impart the
blessing to the Indians. They made this attempt with equal fidelity
under the inspiration and guidance respectively of the two very
different forms in which Christianity, as a religion, was accepted by
themselves, and divided the range of Christendom. Eliot and the Mayhews
stand, and will ever stand, as exponents of the purest, most patient and
persistent zeal of Protestantism, matched only, but not surpassed, by
the chivalrous devotion, constancy, and martyr-heroism of the subjects
of Mr. Parkman's volume, in all the aims and toils of their
impracticab