94 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE 



There was another and darker side to the Puritan character. 

 He was not only selfish but greedy ; compelled to be prudent, 

 he became stingy. In a trade with his neighbor he stretched 

 the tenth commandment and for the time being forgot the other 

 nine. It was small wonder that the rights of savages weighed 

 little in the presence of his wants, which he persuaded himself 

 were necessities. It soon came to pass that bloody reprisals 

 followed Indian cruelty and outrage, the sole answer which a 

 barbarous people could make to civilized treachery. The wasp 

 did not sting until the nest was ravaged ; smarting with pain, in 

 hot revenge the spoiler trampled to death those whom he him- 

 self had driven to madness and revclt. 



In a review of the first contact of the whites with the Indians, 

 and by an impartial consensus of the records, the whole story of 

 that contact, with scarcely an exception, is dishonorable to the 

 whites. Bad faith and broken promises, advantage gained by 

 guile and dishonest diplomacy, were followed by encroachment 

 and dispossession. Through the centuries which have inter- 

 vened our children have been taught to revere the rugged vir- 

 tues of their Puritan ancestors ; poetry and romance, even the 

 historic page, has surrounded them with a shining aureola of 

 sanctity, but in this era of research and impartial scholarship an 

 awakened national conscience sees them beneath ihe deceitful 

 glamour of distance clothed upon with the old frailties of human- 

 ity. Again we witness the old paradox of saint and sinner ; the 

 one erects a church, but for convenience of the other "the devil 

 builds a chapel hardby." 



Without a single exception, so far as disclosed by the record, 

 every permanent settlement in New Hampshire was preceded 

 by an actual or quasi-occupation. This took various forms ; the 

 territory afterwards formed into townships was early overrun 

 with hunters, trappers, fishers, adventurers of all sorts ; some of 

 these were employed by French companies in Canada, some by 

 the Dutch traders of New Netherland. Others came from the 



