84 The Winning of the West 



south of the valley lay warlike and powerful Indian 

 confederacies, now at last thoroughly alarmed and 

 angered by the white advance; while behind these 

 warrior tribes, urging them to hostility, and fur 

 nishing them the weapons and means wherewith 

 to fight, stood the representatives of two great 

 European nations, both bitterly hostile to the new 

 America, and both anxious to help in every way 

 the red savages who strove to stem the tide of set 

 tlement. The close alliance between the soldiers and 

 diplomatic agents of polished old-world powers and 

 the wild and squalid warriors of the wilderness was 

 an alliance against which the American settlers had 

 always to make head in the course of their long 

 march westward. The kings and the peoples of 

 the old world ever showed themselves the inveterate 

 enemies of their blood-kin in the new; they always 

 strove to delay the time when their own race should 

 rise to wellnigh universal supremacy. In mere blind 

 selfishness, or in a spirit of jealousy still blinder, 

 the Europeans refused to regard their kinsmen who 

 had crossed the ocean to found new realms in new 

 continents as entitled to what they had won by 

 their own toil and hardihood. They persisted in 

 treating the bold adventurers who went abroad as 

 having done so simply for the benefit of the men 

 who stayed at home; and they shaped their trans 

 atlantic policy in accordance with this idea. The 

 Briton and the Spaniard opposed the American set 

 tler precisely as the Frenchman had done before 

 them, in the interest of their own merchants and 



