"We have not treated them well, sir; and we never did. They have borne a great deal, and they will bear more still; yet they feel and know it, and some day they may make us feel it too. They have not the wit to take advantage at present of our divisions, and, by joining together themselves, make us feel all their power; for they hate each other worse than they hate us. But, if the same spirit were to take the whole red men, that got hold of the Five Nations many a long year ago, and they were to band together against the whites, as those Five Nations did against the other tribes, they'd give us a great deal of trouble; and though we might thrash them at first, we might teach them to thrash us in the end.
"As it is, however, you see there are two sets of Indians and two sets of white men in this country, each as different from the other as anything can be. The Indians don't say, as they ought, 'The country is ours, and we will fight against all the whites till we drive them out;' but they say, 'The whites are wiser and stronger than we are, and we will help those of them who are wisest and strongest.'
"I don't mean to say that they have not got their likings and dislikings, or that they are not moved by kindness, or by being talked to; for they are great haters, and great likers. Still what I have said is at the bottom of all their friendships with white men. The Dutchmen helped the Five Nations--Iroquois, as the French call them--gave them rifles and gunpowder against their enemies, and taught them to believe they were a very strong people. So the Five Nations liked the Dutch, and made alliance with them. Then came the English, and proved stronger than the Dutch, and the Five Nations attached themselves to the English.
"They have stuck fast to us for a long time, and would not go from us without cause. If they could help to keep us great and powerful they would, and I don't think a little adversity would make them turn. But to see us whipped and scalped would make them think a good deal, and they won't stay long by a people they don't respect.
"They have got their own notions, too, about faith and want of faith. If you are quite friendly with them--altogether--out and out--they'll hold fast enough to their word with you; but a very little turning, or shaking, or doubting, will make them think themselves free from all engagements; and then take care of your scalp-lock. If I am quite sure, when I meet an Indian, that, as the good Book says, 'my heart is right with his heart;' that I have never cheated him, or thought of cheating him; that I have not doubted him, nor do doubt him--I can lie down and sleep in his lodge as safe as if I was in the heart of Albany. But I should not sleep a wink if I knew there was the least little bit of insincerity in my own heart; for they are as 'cute as serpents, and they are not people to wait for explanations. Put your wit against theirs at the back of the forest, and you'll get the worse of it."
"But have we cheated, or attempted to cheat, these poor people?" asked the stranger.
"Why, the less we say about that the better, major," replied Woodchuck, shaking his head. "They have had to bear a good deal; and now when the time comes that we look as if we were going to the wall, perhaps they may remember it."
"But I hope and trust we are not exactly going to the wall," pursued the other, with his colour somewhat heightened; "there has been a great deal said in England about mismanagement of our affairs on this continent; but I have always thought, being no very violent politician myself, that party spirit dictated criticisms which were probably unjust."
"There has been mismanagement enough, major," replied Woodchuck; "hasn't there, Prevost?"
"I fear so, indeed," replied his host with a sigh; "but quite as much on the part of the colonial authorities as on that of the government at home."
"And whose fault is that?" demanded Woodchuck, somewhat warmly; "why, that of the government at home too! Why do they appoint incompetent men? Why do they appoint ignorant men? Why do they exclude from every office of honour, trust, or emolument the good men of the provinces, who know the situation and the wants and the habits of the provinces, and put over us men who, if they were the best men in the world, would be inferior, from want of experience, to our own people, but who are nothing more than a set of presuming, ignorant, grasping blood-suckers, who are chosen because they are related to a minister, or a minister's mistress, or perhaps his valet, and whose only object is to make as much out of us as they can, and then get back again. I do not say that they are all so, but a great many of them are; and this is an insult and an injury to us."
He spoke evidently with a good deal of heat; but his feelings were those of a vast multitude of the American colonists, and those feelings were preparing the way for a great revolution.
"Come, come, Woodchuck," exclaimed Walter Prevost with a laugh, "you are growing warm; and when you are angry, you bite. The major wants to hear your notions of the state of the English power here, and not your censure of the king's government."
"God bless King George!" cried Woodchuck warmly, "and send him all prosperity. There's not a more loyal man in the land than I am; but it vexes me all the more to see his ministers throwing away his people's hearts, and losing his possessions into the bargain. But I'll tell you how it is, major--at least how I think it is--and then you'll see.
"I must first go back a bit. Here are we, the English, in the middle of North America, and we have got the French on both sides of us. Well, we have a right to the country all the way across the continent--and we must have it, for it is our only safety. But the French don't want us to be safe, and so they are trying to get behind us, and push us into the sea. They have been trying it a long time, and we have taken no notice. They have pushed their posts from Canidy, right along by the Wabash and the Ohio, from Lake Erie to the Mississippi; and they have built forts, won over the Ingians, drawing a string round us, which they will tighten every day, unless we cut it.
"And what have the ministers been doing all the time? Why, for a long time they did nothing at all. First, the French were suffered boldly to call the country their own, and to carry off our traders and trappers, and send them into Canidy, and never a word said by our people. Then they built fort after fort, till troops can march and goods can go, with little or no trouble, from Quebec to New Orleans; and all that this produced was a speech from Governor Hamilton, and a message from Governor Dinwiddie. The last, indeed, sent to England, and made representations; but all he got was an order to repel force by force, if he could, but to be quite sure that he did so on the undoubted territories of King George.
"Undoubted! Why, the French made the doubt, and then took advantage of it. Dinwiddie, however, had some spirit, and, with what help he could get, he began to build a fort himself, in the best-chosen spot of the whole country, just by the meeting of the Ohio and the Monongahela. But he had only one man to the French ten, and not a regular company amongst them. So the French marched with a thousand soldiers, and plenty of cannon and stores, turned his people out, took possession of his half-finished fort, and completed it themselves. That was not likely to make the Ingians respect us.
"Well, then, Colonel Washington, the Virginian, and the best man in the land, built Fort Necessity; but they left him without forces to defend it, and he was obliged to surrender to Villiers, and a force big enough to eat him up. That did not raise us with our redskins; and a French force never moved without a whole herd of Ingians, supposed to be in friendship with us, but ready to scalp us whenever we were defeated.
"Then came Braddock's mad march upon Fort Duquesne, where he and a'most all who was with him were killed by a handful of Ingians amongst the bushes--fifteen hundred men dispersed, killed, and scalped, by not four hundred savages--all