At best, there was presented only a dissolving view that was transformed before the observer's gaze. The Indian was immediately called a drunkard, and yet he had no beverage whatever that could intoxicate, and no drug that answered any similar purpose. The first Indian who felt the influence of alcohol found it in the cabin of the " Half-Moon." So, also, with other vices. True, the Indian was a barbarian. He showed no evidence of having been in any way better or more civilized in the seventeenth century

than he may have been in the tenth or fifth. With him, might made right. He imposed upon his women and made them his slaves. He had no intellectual exercise, and possessed not even the rudest culture. He was selfish, took pride in the lowest cunning and had no idea of honor, and, of cour.xe, no word for expressing it. And yet, bad as he was, on the one hand, he should not be held responsible for the European vices that wore engrafted upon him, nor upon the other, should he be judged by standards resulting from centuries of a foreign civilization, or held responsible for the violation of laws of which he had no knowledge.

With the coming of the white man came the fatal sorrows of the Indian. All his world was overthrown. New vices came to his character and new dangers surrounded his home. The one fixed, unchanging and unchangeable factor in his existence, upon which he could imjilicitly rely, was the land ; and now this was snatched from him by devices of which he was totally ignorant. The term "title" conveyed no meaning to his understanding. Acting under the laws of his fathers, and doing only what he had always been taught was right, he found himself accused of gross wrongs under another set of laws of which he had never heard, and whose claim to equity he could not understand.