A Straight Deal; Or, The Ancient Grudge

reatment of the Indian. To speak of it is

him such and such territory, then took it away and gave him less and worse in exchange. Throughout a century our promises to him were a whole basket of scraps of paper. The other day I saw some Indians in California. It had once been their place. All over that region they had hunted and fished and lived

greater service to mankind than the wilderness of the Indian ever could possibly have been-once conceding, as you have to concede, the inevitableness of civilization. Neither you, nor I, nor any man, can remold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we could have behaved better to the Indian. That was in our power. And we gave him a raw deal instead, not once, but again and again. We did it because we could do it without risk, because he was weaker and we could always beat him in the end. And all the while we were doing it, there was our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, founded on a

is being done through dishonest Indian agents and the mean machinery of politics. If you care to know more of the long, bad story, there is a book by Helen Hunt Jack

of the facts, couldn't tell you the history of a single case. But what are the facts to the man who asks, "What has England done in this war, anyway?" The word "land-grabber" has been passed to him by German and Sinn Fein propaganda, and he merely parrots it forth. He couldn't discuss it at all. "Look at the Boers," he may know enough to reply, if you remind him that England's land-grabbing was done a good while ago. Well, we shall certainly look at the Boers in due time, but just now we must look at ourselves. I suppose that the American who d

llions for what was then called Louisiana. Napoleon had his title to this land from Spain. Spain had it from France. France had it-how? She had it because La

s. They had wives and children and wigwams and other possessions in the land where they had always lived; but they were red, and the man in the boat was whit

of argument I concede this, and refer you to our acquisition of Texas. This operation followed some years after the Florida operation. "By request" we "annexed" most of present Texas-in 1845. That was a trick of our slaveholders. They sent people into Texas and these people swung the deal. It was virtually a theft from Mexico. A little while later, in 1848, we "paid" Mexico for California, Arizona, and Nevada. But if you read the true story of Fremont in California, and of the American plots there before the Mexican War, to undermine the government of a friendly nation, plots connived at in W

t it mostly by force and fraud, by driving out of it through firearms and plots people who certainly were there first and who were weaker than ourselves. Our reason was simply that we wanted it and intended to have it. That is precisely what England has done. She has by various means not one whit better or worse than ours, acquired her poss

. Therefore she was more crowded than we were-how much more I leave you to figure out for yourself. I appeal to the fair-minded American reader who only "wants to be shown," and I say to him, when some German or anti-British American talks to him about what a land-grabber England has been in her time to think of these things and to remember that our own past is tarred with the

erman, is helping the trouble of the world, is keeping discord a

must now take up the controversy of those men in front of the bulletin board; we must investigate what lies