e
whole of the inmates of one enclosure--whenever, in fact, the people in
the neighborhood fancy they would like to take possession of their land.
The kinsmen of my friend, with their clan numbering some seven hundred
souls--a peaceable, industrious Christian community, living on land
which had belonged to their ancestors for centuries--were swept off of
it a few years ago at the whim of two of their rulers: their houses and
poor little belongings were all left behind, and they were driven a
thousand miles into a sterile, malarious region where nearly half of
their number died. The story of their sufferings, their homesickness and
their despair on the outward journey, and of how still later some thirty
of them returned on foot, carrying the bones of those who had died to
lay them in their old homes, is one of the most dramatic pages in
history. De Quincey's "Flight of a Tartar Clan" does not equal it in
pathos or as a story of heroism and endurance. At the end of their
homeward journey, when almost within sight of their homes, the heroic
little band were seized by order of the ruler of their enclosure and
committed to prison. The tribe are still in the malarious swamps to
which they were exiled. Strangers hold their farms and the houses which
they built with their own hands.

The anomalous condition of a people legally ranking as animals, and not
human beings, would naturally produce unpleasant consequences when they
are criminally the aggressors. When they steal or kill they cannot be
tried, sent to jail or hung as if they were human in the eye of the law.
The ruler of each enclosure is granted arbitrary power in such cases to
punish at his discretion. He is judge, jury, and often executioner. He
has a control over the lives of these people more absolute than that of
any Christian monarch over his subjects. If he thinks proper to shoot
the offender, he can call upon the regular army of the country to
sustain him. If the individual offender escapes, the whole of the
inmates of the enclosure are held responsible, and men, women and
children are slaughtered by wholesale and without mercy.

My readers understand my little fable by this time. It is no fable, but
a disgraceful truth.

The government under which a people--many of whom are educated,
enlightened Christian gentlemen--are denied the legal rights of human
beings and all protection of law is not the absolute despotism of Siara
or Russia, but the United States, t