This letter conveyed the information that a ship had arrived the day before bringing news from the new settlement, and that "They have bought the island Manhattes from the wild men for the value of sixty guilders " $24 of our money. The acquisition of title to the site of what has become the second commercial entrepot of the world for so ridiculous a sum -- which, moreover, was paid not in money but iu goods -- is a familiar theme for moralizing and didactic writers. Yet there can be no question that the value given the savages reasonably corresponded to honorable standards of equivalent recompense. The particular land with which they parted had to them no more worth than an equal area of the water of the river or the bay, except in the elementary regard that it was land, where man can abide, and not water, where he can not abide; while to the Dutch the sole worth lay in the chance of its ultimate development. On the other hand, the value received by the

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HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

settlers was an eminently substantial one, consisting of possessions having a practical economic utility beyond anything known to their previous existence. " A metal kettle, a spear, a knife, a hatchet, transformed the whole life of a savage. A blanket was to him a whole wardrobe." Moreover, the moral phases of such a bargain can not fairly be scrutinized by any fixed conception of the relative values involved. It was purely a bargain of friendly exchange for mutual convenience and welfare. The Indians did not understand, and could not have been expected to understand, that it meant a formal and everlasting alienation of their lands; on the other hand, they deemed that they were covenanting merely to admit the whites peaceably to rights of joint occupancy.