dealing with inferior races, as
they are called, except through a process of extermination. Here in
Massachusetts this was so from the outset. Nearly every one here has
read Longfellow's poem, "The Courtship of Miles Standish," and calls to
mind the short, sharp conflict between the Plymouth captain and the
Indian chief, Pecksuot, and how those God-fearing Pilgrims ruthlessly
put to death by stabbing and hanging a sufficient number of the already
plague-stricken and dying aborigines. That episode occurred in April,
1623, only a little more than two years after the landing we to-night
celebrate, and was, so far as New England is concerned, the beginning of
a series of wars which did not end until the Indian ceased to be an
element in our civilization. When John Robinson, the revered pastor of
the Plymouth church, received tidings at Leyden of that killing near
Plymouth,--for Robinson never got across the Atlantic,--he wrote: "Oh,
how happy a thing had it been, if you had converted some before you had
killed any! There is cause to fear that, by occasion, especially of
provocation, there may be wanting that tenderness of the life of man
(made after God's image) which is meet. It is also a thing more glorious
in men's eyes, than pleasing in God's or convenient for Christians, to
be a terror to poor, barbarous people." This all has a very familiar
sound. It is the refrain of nearly three centuries; but, as an
historical fact, it is undeniable that, from 1623 down to the year now
ending, the American Anglo-Saxon has in his dealings with what are known
as the "inferior races" lacked "that tenderness of the life of man which
is meet," and he has made himself "a terror to poor, barbarous people."
How we of Massachusetts carried ourselves towards the aborigines here,
the fearful record of the Pequot war remains everlastingly to tell. How
the country at large has carried itself in turn towards Indian, African,
and Asiatic is matter of history. And yet it is equally matter of
history that this carriage, term it what you will,--unchristian, brutal,
exterminating,--has been the salvation of the race. It has saved the
Anglo-Saxon stock from being a nation of half-breeds,--miscegenates, to
coin a word expressive of an idea. The Canadian half-breed, the
Mexican, the mulatto, say what men may, are not virile or enduring
races; and that the Anglo-Saxon is none of these, and is essentially
virile and enduring, is due to the fact that the les