The impressive record of these disastrous failures, in connection with the uniformly unflattering accounts of the lands farther north, deterred all The poverty of European nations from like pompous adventurings. the native inhabitants of North America saved them from the swift fate which overtook the rich peoples of the south, and for a century preserved them even from intrusion, except of the most fugitive kind. This fact of their complete poverty is by far the most conspicuous

ABORIGINAL

INHABITANTS

aspect of the original comparative condition, in both economic and social regards, of the North American Indians, as well as of the history of their gradual expulsion and extirpation. Possessing nothing but land and the simplest concomitants of primitive existence, they did not present to the European invaders an established and measurably advanced and affluent organization of society, inviting speedy and comprehensive overthrow and the immediate substitution on a general scale of the supremacy and institutions of the subjugators. Dispersed through the primeval forests in small communities, they did not confront the stranger foe with formidable masses of population requiring to be dealt with by the summary methods of formal conquest; and skilled in but few industries and arts, which they practiced not acquisitively but only to serve the most uecessary ends of daily life, and maintaining themselves in a decidedly struggling and adventitious fashion by a rude agriculture and the pursuits of hunting and fishing, their numbers in the aggregate, following well-known laws of population, were, indeed, comparatively few. Yet the same conditions made them the ruggedest, bravest, and most independent of races, and utterly unassimilable. Thus, as found by the Europeans, while because of their poverty provoking no programme of systematic conquest and dispossession, they were foredoomed to inevitable progressive dislodgement and ultimate extermination or segregation. The cultivated and numerous races of Mexico and Peru, on the other hand, exciting the cupidity of the Spaniards by their wealth, were reduced to subjection at a blow.