st purchase of the Indian proprietors."

It is no doubt true that for the most part the lands were purchased,
and, according to the idea of the English, honorably purchased, yet the
natives could not fail to foresee the result of these cessions of
territory. There were English settlements at Bridgewater, Middleboro',
Taunton, Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Swanzey, all within the ancient
jurisdiction of Massasoit. And as a perpetual monitor to Philip of
his limited domains, though in obedience to a different and highly
honorable motive, the people erected a fence quite across the neck of
land on the south of Swanzey, and thus confined the Pokanokets by metes
and bounds.

That Philip was annoyed by applications for land is evident from his
letter, without date, addressed to Governor Prince of Plymouth:

"Philip would intreat that favor of you, and any of the magistrates,
if any English or Indians speak about any land, he pray to give them no
answer at all. This last summer he made that promise with you, that
he would sell no land in seven years' time, for that he would have no
English trouble him before that time. He has not forgot that you
promise him."

The apostle Eliot, in a letter to the Massachusetts government, dated
in 1684, asking that certain fraudulent purchases of the Indians might
be annulled, puts this suggestive inquiry: "Was not a principal cause
of the late war about encroachments on Philip's land at Mount Hope?"

The third disturbing cause was the desire of our ancestors to convert
the Indian chiefs and tribes to Christianity. This was a primary and
chief object of the settlement of the country. Governor Craddock, in
a letter of February, 1629, to Endicott and his Council, says: "You
will demean yourselves justly and courteously toward the Indians,
thereby to draw them to affect our persons, and consequently our
religion." And the Governor of Massachusetts colony by his oath was
required to use his "best endeavor to draw on the natives of New
England to the knowledge of the true God." The company in England also
expressed the hope that the ministers who were sent out would, by
faithful preaching, godly conversation and exemplary lives, in God's
appointed time, reduce the Indians to the obedience of the Gospel of
Christ. And there is no fact in the history of the colonists
inconsistent with an earnest purpose to accomplish so desirable a
result. But the most formidable and warlike of the Indian