In all the Indian Avars in which the aborigines were involved with the Puritans, the Dutch, aud the Virginians, and which cost thousands of lives and an untold amount of suffering on both sides, it may fairly be doubted whether the Indians were in a single instance the aggressors. The Quakers of Pennsylvania, under William Penn, had no difficulty with them. The Indians in the British possessions of North America are and for almost a century have been peacefully disposed. But when Hendrick Hudson sailed in the " Half- Moon " up the river which bears his name, one of the very first acts of himself and crew was to make a wanton and unprovoked attack with firearms upon the inoffensive natives, whom curiosity had brought down to the shore.

The general plan of our ancestors in those good old days, with regard to those whom they found in possession where they wanted to settle, was robbery and murder first ; afterwards war, negotiation and then missionaries. This, too, with the exception of the missionaries, was the course pursued towards them by the redoubtable William Kieft, the Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam, about the year 1643. The Puritans in their treatment of the aborigines were •often harsh and unjust. But they were men governed by certain religious ideas, and never did anything api)roacliing in wanton wickedness the act of Kieft which led to the outbreak, in which Anne Hutchinson lost her life, in Pelham in 1643.

In the year 1626 the munificent sum of twentyfour dollars had been originally paid to the Indians for the whole of New York Island -- (twenty-two thousand acres) ; paid too, in " beads and trinkets," on which, very likely, there was a large profit to the buyers. No doubt the Indians ought to have been satisfied ; but, strange to say, when they were crowded out, not only from the island, but from Staten Island, Long Island and the shores of the bay, the Hudson River and the Sound by the new settlers, they took it to heart in away for which neither beads nor trinkets proved a solid consolation.