untries at very great
expences.... [The Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy
in their minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons
daily inculcated on them... but according to the present unwise plan,
two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of those
villages... who are generally the dregs and offscourings of our
climes... by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited and
poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and
five hundred per cent cheaper than the orderly traders.... Instead of
showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life,
they instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical
lessons of obscenity and blasphemy."

In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There is no
sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indian chiefs to
various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country,
alleging the debauchment of their young men and warning the white man,
with whom they desired to be friends, that in an Indian drink and blood
lust quickly combined.

Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to be read by
Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his reflections on liberty,
justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not sound unworthily today. His
sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but
he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples
the greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work
discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man
with a sense of commercial values. Yet, instead of making a career for
himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty years in
the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the exception of some
of his older brother traders, he preferred the Chickasaw to any other
society.

The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect to
find stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of his book.
The conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical, in a
temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large
a part of conventional standards. The reason for his being what he was
is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book. Perhaps,
to him, it was self evident. We may let it be so to us, and see it most
clearly presented in a picture composed from some of