HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. 



exciting, exasperating, and sustaining them. The Indians 

 grew more and more dissatisfied as they saw the Colonists 

 advancing in wealth and power, and every year fixing 

 themselves with a firmer hold upon the soil. It was this 

 inherent hostility between a savage race and that civilized 

 one which it sees to be too strong for it, and to be mena- 

 cing its future, added to the Indian's natural love for 

 blood and pillage, which stimulated attacks which were 

 sought to be excused by pretences that this treaty had not 

 been faithfully kept, or that promise had not been honestly 

 performed. 



It may be doubted, however, whether even the fierce 

 savage of the eastern wilds would not have chosen to re- 

 treat from the coasts toward the Five Nations without 

 risking the chances of conflict, if he had not been urged 

 on and aided and abetted even in his brutalest work, by 

 the deadly hatred then borne by the French settler to his 

 English competitor; in which the old hostility of race was 

 supplemented and intensified by the ferocity of Jesuit- 

 fanned fanaticism. 



When the echoes of the last hearty war-whoop died 

 away among the New-England hills, a new leaf was 

 turned in her history. Even her strong men breathed 

 freer as they wrought along her frontiers; and her women 

 slept sweeter, with their little ones around them, every- 

 where under the deep shadows of her ancestral woods. 



xxxii 



