Of no other of the nations of Europe which colonized America, except the Dutch, can it be truly said that this wise and Chiistian principle always governed them in their dealings with the Indians. Much has been written about AVilliam Penn as being the first to purchase their lands by treating with them. But Director Minuit on the banks of the Hudson preceded him in this honorable and Christian treatment of the Indians by more than half a century. And the same policy and treatment was ever continued during the whole period of the Dutch possession of the Province of New Netherland.

At the date of the purchase the Indian population of Manhattan Island is said by some writers to have been 200, men, women, and children, and by none has it been put at more than 300. The numbers of the Dutch, we know, were only 270.' So that the population on each side could not have been far from equal. A fact that speaks well for those early Dutch people, for from the discovery up to 1626 their possession of the island was only by the suflerance of the Indians, and during that whole time there was never a contest or a quarrel between them and the savages.

The price paid for the Island was a fair one, for the time, age, and place, for it was nothing but a little wild island on a coast almost unknown, of a continent entirely unknown. It was but one of hundreds and hundreds of small islands lying all along the Western shores of the Atlantic Ocean, with nothing to show it had any value at all except the prior occupation of one end of it as a trading post by the Dutch. And many of those same little islands in as out-ofthe-way places, may be purchased to-day for a price almost as low.