Note 9 — Chapter V

The notions commonly entertained by Europeans relative to the aborigines of America, are principally derived from the exaggerated statements of early voyagers, or from the fantastic creations of romance writers, who, in representing these supposed “children of nature,” have endowed them with qualities they never possessed, and bestowed upon them ideas, sentiments, and expressions utterly unknown, as well as perfectly incomprehensible, to the race. An opinion of the character of our savages, formed from an examination of the miserable stragglers which still hang upon the out-skirts of civilization, would be quite as inadequate and inaccurate. The unvarnished truth is, that the best of the known tribes exhibit specimens of humanity in its extreme of degradation, from a more perfect condition of which but few, faint and almost obliterated traces, are occasionally to be discerned. Inevitably destined to extinction, they appear, like another coloured race, to be suffering under the infliction of a tremendous temporal punishment for some ancient national crime. Such a conclusion is at least strongly borne out by the history of this continent, and we have already lived to see Spain beginning to receive her reward for the part she played in the dreadful tragedies by which this history is dedecorated; must not the day of retribution for the United States also arrive?—T.