124 The Winning of the West 



These facts may with advantage be pondered by 

 those men of the present day who are either so 

 ignorant or of such lukewarm patriotism that 

 they do not wish to see the United States keep pre- 

 pared for war and show herself willing and able 

 to adopt a vigorous foreign policy whenever there is 

 need of furthering American interests or upholding 

 the honor of the American flag. America is bound 

 scrupulously to respect the rights of the weak; but 

 she is no less bound to make stalwart insistence on 

 her own rights as against the strong. 



The count against the British on the Northwest- 

 ern frontier is, not that they insisted on their rights, 

 but that they were guilty of treachery to both friend 

 and foe. The success of the British was incompat- 

 ible with the good of mankind in general, and of 

 the English-speaking races in particular; for they 

 strove to prop up savagery, and to bar the westward 

 march of the settler-folk whose destiny it was to 

 make ready the continent for civilization. But the 

 British cannot be seriously blamed because they 

 failed to see this. Their fault lay in their aiding 

 and encouraging savages in a warfare which was 

 necessarily horrible ; and still more in their repeated 

 breaches of faith. The horror and the treachery 

 were the inevitable outcome of the policy on which 

 they had embarked ; it can never be otherwise when 

 a civilized government endeavors to use, as allies in 

 war, savages whose acts it can not control and for 

 whose welfare it has no real concern. 



Doubtless the statesmen who shaped the policy 



