OLD AGE. FLING down the faded blossoms of the Spring, Let it depart, and learn to understand best! Ah! I remember how in early days The primrose and the wild-flower grew beside And I remember how, in Life's hot noon, Days of sweet peril, when the serpent lay The light of Spring, the Summer glow, are o'er, And leaves fall fast, and let the truthful sun- For me the hooded herbs of Autumn grow, And the decline of life's long pilgrimage And round my path the aromatic air Breathes health and perfume, and the turfy ground Is soft for weary feet, and smooth and fair With little thornless blossoms that abound What is there to regret? Why should I mourn And so I drop the roses from my hand, A REGRET. I BLAME not that your courage failed, Wise was your choice the world will say, Yet if you could have dared to lay Not loveless nor unsweet my days; Ah! better had we both been laid Spectator. A. J. C. DR. LIVINGSTONE. - In a letter, dated January 18, addressed to Sir Edward Sabine, President of the Royal Society, by Sir Thomas Maclear, Astronomer Royal at the Cape of Good Hope, occurs the following passage: "I am very anxious for news of Dr. Livingstone. The last was from Ujiji, dated in May. Ujiji is seated near the north-east border of Lake Tanganyika. He had been robbed of the supplies forwarded to him from Zanzibar; and the chief of the place refused the assistance he needed, or to permit letters from him to be conveyed to Zanzibar. He had written some forty letters while slowly recovering from illness, which he wished to forward. Some of these, no doubt, were records of astronomical observations made at particular localities. He attributed the hostility of And let the thorn-pricks heal, and take my the people to their suspicion that he would ex pose their slave dealings. His old friend, Dr. Kirk, who is acting political agent at Zanzibar, will make every possible effort to relieve him; but, unfortunately, the influence of the authori ties at Zanzibar does not reach the remote position of Ujiji." From Blackwood's Magazine. will seek their mates among the Negroes; THE ANTAGONISM OF RACE AND COLOUR; and the Negroes themselves, though they OR, WHITE, RED, BLACK, AND YEL-look to the whites for protection, and are LOW, IN AMERICA, we look upon them with curiosity rather than repugnance, and hold out to them, when either commerce or courtesy requires, the right hand of good-fellowship. But when the man of white skin goes forth to remote regions, to subdue and form settlements, as in America, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand, he goes as a superior being, assumes possession by the right, if not by the divinity, of his ĉolour, and will listen to no terms on the part of the original possessors of the soil but absolute submission to his sovereign will. If they submit, they may live. If they prove troublesome, they must be subdued. If they put themselves into a state of permanent rebellion, they must be exterminated. This seems to be the law, above all other law, which the Caucasian race has imposed upon itself; a law which has been somewhat relaxed in the case of the French and Spaniards, who were once the principal colonizers of the New World, but which has never been seriously relaxed by the Anglo-Saxons, the Anglo-Celts, and their Teutonic cousins who now between them form the great all-conquering, allpervading race, that replenishes the waste places of the globe, and clears the way before it by the dispossession and subjection of the natives. not averse to marriage with them, have In our old and thickly-populated Europe, neither respect nor love for the red skins the several nationalities that possess the or the yellow. In Europe we see so little soil among them, whether they be called of people who are not of the pure Caucasian Goths or Latins, Celts or Saxons, Scandi-blood, that when persons of the red, the navians or Tartars, Greeks or Turks, or an black, or the yellow races come among us, amalgamation, more or less complete, of some or all of them, form in reality but a portion of that great race, of Asiatic origin, which it is now the fashion to call the Caucasian. Among these nationalities the antipathy of race can scarcely be said to exist; and whatever jealousy or prejudice of country may still be found among them, arises from political and religious rather than from ethnological causes. Some vulgar English may entertain a prejudice against the Irish, just as many vulgar and unreasonable Irish entertain a hatred of the "Sassenach." A similar prejudice once existed against Scotsmen, that first grew up in the reign of James I., and was fostered up to the time of George III. by such onesided writers as Dr. Samuel Johnson and others, and was aided more or less by the traditions of the stage. It also existed to a much greater degree against Dutchmen, whom it was the custom to call a nation of rogues, and against Frenchmen, whom in the middle of the last century it was sometimes held to be the duty of every true Englishman to hate, for the not very satisfactory reason put by Goldsmith into the mouth of the old soldier of Marlborough, "that they were all slaves, and wore wooden shoes." But the real antipathy or antagonism of race - whatever the feeling or the instinct may be called, which, with occasional exceptions on the part of individuals, forbids and prevents the union of the is almost wholly a matter of colour. The white or Caucasian race, more especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, does not freely or even commonly, intermarry with the red-skinned aborigines of America; with the black-skinned Negroes, Caffres, or Hottentots of Africa; or with the yellow-skinned Chinese, Japanese, or Malays. The same antipathy or antagonism exists among the races that are not white. Neither the Chinese nor the Red Indians sexes It is in the United States of America, where many problems, or what were once thought problems, of religion, politics, and the art of government, are either solved or will become solvable by the progress of time, that this question of the predominance of race assumes its largest proportion, and works itself out in the most remarkable manner. The British and the Americans are alike in this respect. It is in the blood, the bone, the flesh, and whole spirit of the people; one in this respect, though politically two. Wherever they go, they must be kings and lords over all men who have skins of a different colour from their own. When, as in the case of the Asiatic peoples, of an old civilization, that already possess the soil and are too numerous to be dispossessed, this haughty people only establishes itself to trade, and not to colonizeit must govern, as the native kings, princes, rajahs, and rulers of India were not long in discovering; and as the Chinese and the Japanese, with a not unnatural jealousy, have been and still are somewhat apprehensive of discovering also. And what the British have done with the dark-skinned peoples of the East, we may be quite sure the Americans would have done if they had had the opportunity. In landing upon the Atlantic shores of the North American continent, the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic emigrants we use both terms, for the British people, in the proper acceptation of the phrase, are quite as much Celtic as Saxon, if they are not, as Messrs Pike and Nicholas, and other writers, have endeavoured to prove, even more Celtic than Saxon or Anglo-Saxon - found themselves face to face with native tribes of a character, disposition, and race, very different from their own. The aborigines were inferior in all respects to the new-comers, though the new-comers did not arrive at the conclusion that they were so by any species of reasoning, inductive or other, but leaped to it without reasoning at all, having no more doubt of the fact than they had of the inferiority of the dog, the horse, the ox, or other animal created for their use. The aborigines, however, did not reciprocate the conviction; and having those nine points of the law which are included in actual possession, and all the instincts of humanity, on their side, treated the interlopers as dangerous visitors, who were either to be driven back into the ocean, or smitten, hip and thigh, in fierce and relentless warfare. Had the Red Indians been a docile and submissive people, who would have gently bowed their necks to the yoke, adopted the manners and speech of their conquerors, consented to be their hewers of wood and drawers of water-in fact, their agricultural or domestic slaves - there was no such antipathy of blood on the part of the invading Caucasians as would have led the superior race to constant warfare with the inferior. But the inferior people were as proud and haughty as the superior, and the consequence was war, daily, yearly, perpetually war that could only be ended by the unqualified submission of the weaker party. This war has lasted for upwards of three centuries, and is not yet concluded. The unsubmissive red man has been treated for all that time by his next neighbours as if he were a wolf, to be shot down, hunted down, extirpated; though if, like the more docile man with a black epidermis, he would have consented to be made a slave, he would have been affectionately cared for. He has been driven by degrees from the sea-board of the New England States, out of New York, out of Pennsylvania, out of the South, far away into the Great West, first beyond the Ohio river, where he made desperate fight within the memory of living men, who in their youth never retired to rest without danger to their scalps, and those of their wives and children. From the western bank of the Ohio they have been driven, with constantly diminishing numbers, towards the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. In vain the Federal Government exercised its authority to protect them. The arm of the law was weak, and the passions of the frontier men were strong. And on their part the Indians were stealthy, aggressive, and treacherous. Tardy measures, inaugurated by a distant Government, were of no avail in emergency, and many a savage fight between the two races was fought out, to the extermination of the weaker, before the Central Government was made formally aware that difficulties had arisen. The Indians did not wage honourable war. They were burglars and murderers rather than soldiers and patriots, and when caught red-handed were slain, not only without the slightest compunction, but very often with the most savage satisfaction. Philanthropists inveighed without avail against the proceedings of the settlers. Public opinion, more especially on the infested frontiers, was clearly against mercy; and public writers, living in more settled and peaceable districts, whence the Indians had long since disappeared, were of opinion that interference by the central power was both unwise and useless, and that the matter should be left entirely in the hands of those who most severely felt the hardship and the danger of Indian con- versal at the present time, in all parts of the tiguity. It was boldly asserted by Mr. United States where the red man and the Parton in his "Life of President Jackson," white man come together. Statesmen have who was chief magistrate from 1824 to 1832, not held this language-members of Con"that the white settler of the frontiers gress have refrained from giving it utterance could not by any possibility live in peace - it has never found its way into State pawith the Indians, and that the intense pers, or been openly avowed,- but it has, antipathy which was excited in the mind of nevertheless, been the common thought and the white man, by living in proximity to expression of all white men of the Anglothe red man, was sure to degenerate into Saxon race ever since the discovery and rancorous hostility. The white settler did colonization of America, except among a not long continue to believe that an Indian small minority of Quakers and philanthrohad rights which the white man was bound pists. The great William Penn and the to respect." A letter, which went the members of his amiable sect, from his day round of the American press, dated Septem- to ours, have always advocated a policy of ber 1859, from San Francisco, declared emphatically that "the Federal Government committed a great mistake at that time in not ordering a large military force to California, with orders to hunt and shoot down all the Indians from the Colorado to the Klamath! This," says the writer, "would have been the cheapest method of managing the Indian affairs of California, and perhaps the most humane! A weak sentimentalism may be horrified that civilized men should slaughter Indians as they would slaughter wolves; but the strong-hearted clear-headed philanthropist will say that a general slaughter, for the clearly-expressed purpose of getting the friendless red men out of the way, is preferable to the system of slow heart-breakage and long-drawn torments now practised. It is a settled fact that every wild Indian in the State must die; and the question is, whether it were better that he should be shot at once, or tortured through half-a-dozen years by rain, disease, bereavement of all relatives and friends, and then finally shot because he has committed some 'outrage.' If I were the Indians, I should prefer being shot at once. I should enter a strong protest against this violation of all my natural rights by wicked, rude, uncontrolled white men- they being secure from punishment, and I hopeless of redress. It is supposed that ten years ago there were sixty thousand Indians in the State; to-day there are not ten thousand." Such language as this, atrocious as it must appear in England and Scotland, where we are not troubled with Red Indians, is by no means exceptional, but nearly uni peace with, and of justice towards, the Indians; but their humane policy has never prevailed so far as to influence the actions of the Federal Government and its agents on the frontier partly on account of the savage atrocities committed, often without provocation, upon the families of the border settlers; partly on account of the natural incompatibility of good neighbourship between a people exclusively addicted to the chase, and needing their aboriginal forests and large territories for their subsistence, and a people devoted to commerce and agriculture, and living together in towns and villages; and partly on account of the political necessity, real or supposed, that twists all laws, divine and human, to its own purposes, that led the central Government to look leniently upon the sharp practices or the gross injustice of the border whites, when with rum or brandy they enticed, or with bullets and swords they drove, the poor red man to destruction. Of course no civilized Government, such as that of the United States has ever been, or as that of the British colonies was before the outbreak of the War of Independence, ever avowed a policy of extermination, or openly acted upon it. On the contrary, the semblance of good faith and amity was always maintained in the political relationship of the white race towards the red. When the British colonists of New-England that departed in the Mayflower, and those under Lord Baltimore, General Oglethorpe, and others, peopled the regions farther south, and took possession of the soil that belonged to the aborigines, they found the different tribes of Indians in possession of different portions of the country as common huntingground belonging to the tribe, clan, or nation. Individual property in the soil was unknown, as it always is among savages. The British settlers, therefore, could not acquire legitimate individual rights from the Indians, because the Indians, as individuals, possessed no such rights themselves. To prevent fraud, and to legalize individual titles after the European fashion, the British Government, at a very early date, prohibited all its subjects from purchasing land from the Indians, and entered into a treaty with the chiefs of the native tribes, by which the latter bound themselves, when they wished to sell their hunting-grounds, to give the right of pre-emption to the British Crown. Thus it became an established principle that the Indians had only a right of collective possession in their own lands; that they could not sell any portion of them as private property to any individuals whatever; and that the Government alone had the privilege of purchasing their right of possession, and of converting the tenure of the lands into fee-simple. After the Revolution, and the Declaration of Independence, the Government of the United States claimed this right, as one of inheritance from the British Crown; and their whole transactions with the Indians have been founded on it since that event. Formerly, an Indian reserve meant a certain tract of land left in possession of an Indian tribe, on which no white man was allowed to settle. Not only did the American Government prohibit the Indians from selling these reserves in the first colonized States of the seaboard to individuals, but it would not permit them even to divide their farms or lots among themselves, and convert them into freeholds. They were either to possess them in common, or give them up and remove to the west. Furthermore, it refused to allow the rights of American citizenship to an Indian, under any circumstances. Some of these stringent acts of injustice, as they must be called, were afterwards either abrogated altogether, or modified by consent and usage, in the several States that formed the original thirteen that successfully rebelled against Great Britain; for which abrogation there was the sufficient reason that the Indians, who thus remained in the heart of a country that every day become more and more populous with the dominant race, were too few in number to render it worth while to act exceptionally towards them. It became the policy of the Federal Government to encourage the removal of the Indians to the west, first of all to the prairies, and the central regions that border on the cis-Atlantic slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It was a long time before the Indians were finally expelled from the rich and prosperous lands of the original States, now teeming with population, wealth, and luxury; and the long history of every one of those States contains many a bloody page, recounting the fierce struggles of the Indians to be revenged upon the whites who were dispossessing them of their huntinggrounds, and of the equally fierce struggles of the whites to settle accounts with the savages by the short and easy method of extermination. The Seminole war, carried on by a famous Indian, known to the journalism of the time, and to history now, as Billy Bowlegs, taxed the patience and the strategy of the American Government for nearly twenty years, within living memory; and General Sherman — without the prior aid of whose masterly soldiership and unprecedented daring and success in his famous flank-march through Georgia, General Grant, the actual President of the United States, would never have been able to strike the final blow against the Southern confederacy - has been busily engaged in keeping the peace of the far-western confines of civilization against the marauding and murderous Indians of the prairies. General Grant, in his recently delivered message to Congress, aware from early professional experience as a soldier, and from later experience as a statesman, of the length, the cost, and the cruelty of Indian wars, expressed his anxiety to inaugurate a better system, or rather to extend the old system of treating the Indians, by placing them in reserves. He says: lived in peace with Indians while the people of "The Quakers are well known as having other sects have been engaged in quarrels with them: they oppose war, and deal fairly. The President has consequently given them the management of a few reservations, with most satisfactory results. General Grant holls that any system looking to the extinction of the Indian race is too horrible to be considered. He sees no substitute except in placing all Indians on large reservations as rapidly as possible, and giving them absolute protection there; and adds that as soon as they should be fitted for it, they should be induced to take these lands severally, and set up territorial governments for them selves." The attempt is well meant, and the United States have a sufficient territory in a state of wilderness to have enough and to spare to allow the poor Indian to try the experiment whether he can be permanently weaned from the habits of the savage, and taught to live as a Christian, and a civilized citizen of a free state. The result of the contest is |
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