Church; this we would bring to fruit among princes, kings, and great men.' Such is the not ineloquent language of this pastoral letter; language worthy to be addressed to monarchs by the consecrated ministers of Christianity.*

Without dwelling any further on the influence which Christianity exerts over the progress of society in these relations, I pass to another branch of the subject. Hitherto, I have discussed it in reference to the world at large, its institutions of government, its general well-being, its condition of peace or war, its outward aspect, and the monuments of its civilization;—that is, in reference to man, the chief actor in those events which occupy the page of history. But whilst the well-being of general society has been so beneficially affected by the doctrines and establishments of Christianity, there is one portion of the human race, which, as I intimated in the outset, is more peculiarly indebted to its influence; and that is Woman. Let us test this, by example and by analysis.

Suppose that you reside in Paris at the opening of the French Revolution. You are in the very centre of the civilization and social refinement of Europe. Abuses exist in the government of the country; social evils in the condition of the people of a most malignant type; but yet learning, religion, the useful and liberal arts, polished manners, law, everything which marks and embellishes society or man as a member of society,-all these are abundantly possessed by the French. Place yourself, then, for the scene that is to come, on the field of the Place de la Révolution. In the midst is the perpetual guillotine. Power, hurled down from her ancient place in the palace of kings,Power sits enthroned here, a drunken harlot upon the gallows, and calls herself Liberty. The soil beneath is forever soaked with human gore. The victim of to-day comes, undistinguished by pomp or state from those who have gone before, but still no common personage. On the same spot, you may, perhaps, have seen Louis of Bourbon executed, at the fiat of a voice mightier than of kings, that of an oppressed people goaded into madness by the combination of civil discord and foreign invasion. Led up the slippery steps of the scaffold by a file of armed men, appears one, equally illustrious in descent, equally unfortunate in destiny, with the dead Louis; the daughter, wife, and sister of kings, but queen herself no longer, the dethroned, uncrowned, condemned Marie Antoinette.

Ward's L. of Nations.

Do ten thousand blades leap from their scabbards, not merely to avenge a look that threatens her with insult, but to rescue her from an impending ignominious death? No, she perishes, like the meanest of her fellow-victims; a single roll of the drum drowns her death-cry; her mangled remains are pushed aside; and the idle crowd, glutted with blood, or palled with sights of woe, when the emotion of the moment is passed, waits listlessly for the next in turn among the doomed of the Reign of TerShe, the purple-born,—лooqvooɣɛvvnin,-nursed in the lap of imperial greatness, for a life-time the idolized object of the adulation of courts, has just emerged from the subterranean cell of a common prison-house, to be drawn amid the coarse cries of a frantic rabble to the scaffold. Is the age, then, of chivalry gone? And is the glory of Europe extinguished forever? No. You witness, to be sure, acts damning to their doers, perpetrated in the delirium of national fury; but only in christian Europe or America would they be peculiarly memorable as public crimes.

ror.

A woman has been tried, condemned, and executed according to the law of the land. And why not? Why not, I say? What is there of remarkable in it? Why is it, that we feel shocked, revolted, horror-struck, by the spectacle of such an execution? Simply, because in Christendom, and Christendom only, there is an admiration, an affection, a gallantry, a religious sentiment, that like the heaven-descended cloud which the goddess of Love caused to gather about her favorite Paris at the siege of Troy, invests woman with a sort of halo of immunity and of respect. In other countries and times, and under other religious dispensations, it would seldom, if ever happen, that a woman could possess sufficient consequence to be thought deserving of the solemn death of Marie Antoinette; or to cause that death to send a shock of grief and of horror through surrounding nations. In Turkey, the everlasting oblivion of a loaded sack, and a moon-light plunge into the Lethean waters of the Bosphorus, would quietly follow the guilt, real or imputed, of a woman. In the remote East, it would be happiness enough for her, were she the pride of her sex, to be offered up as a burnt sacrifice on the funeral pyre of her husband. In more barbarous communities, her fate might have combined the cruelty of the latter case, with the obscurity of the former.

We have present before us, in various parts of the United States, a complete example of human life in its rudest and

lowest condition, that of the savage, of a race, not only without Christianity, but with scarce the least tincture of civilization.

The Indians of North America are for the chief part at the earliest stage of existence, the hunter-state, subsisting by the chase or its products, averse to agriculture, wedded to the life of the woods, possessing only the most imperfect rudiments of social institutions, devoted to predatory war, and in the brief intervals of battle or the chase given up to habits of sloth, and of brutality, which the very beasts of the wilderness would scorn to imitate. We reproach ourselves as a people for the wrongs the Indians have sustained at our hands, banished or wasted as they are from the river-banks and the woodlands they once occupied, and perishing away by the diseases and vices they have caught from us. We have ample cause of self-reproach. But, are we wholly or chiefly blamable in this? The Indians take from us the vices of civilized life,and they die. Is that our fault? Why do they not copy our virtues? Are not our virtues open to their imitation as well as our vices? Are we responsible, if they perseveringly choose the latter, and perseveringly reject the former? Have we not strenuously endeavored to educate them, to christianize them, to wean them from their obstinate vagabondage of life, and to bring them to habits of industry and respectability? It is our misfortune quite as much as theirs, that, thus far, we have poorly succeeded in these benevolent purposes; that the millions upon millions, expended by the government or the citizens of the United States in the attempt to civilize them, have been as waters spilled on the ground; that, in general, they have not, and can neither be persuaded nor driven to adopt, any of those institutions of society, which alone are competent to protect one people against the violence or the fraud of another.

The Indian no longer dwells by the pleasant valley of his fathers, by the islands they loved to frequent, by the waters where they were used to launch the light canoe; and the forests, whose deep solitudes were to them a congenial home, have disappeared before the axe of the European. True. And did the all-wise Providence who created this beautiful land, who over-canopied the earth with this bright sky above us, who caused the heavens to send down refreshing showers upon it, and the sun to shed over it his kindling and fecundating rays, did that Providence design this beautiful land to be the desart lair of wild beasts, or of a handful of men wild as they?

Shall we lament that the hut of the savage has given place to the populous city; that smiling harvest-fields have sprung up in the bosom of the wilderness; and that these temples of religion consecrated to the service of the true God, have superseded the barbarous rites of the heathen? To them also the Word was preached, to them civilization was offered; they refused it, and they died in their unbelief; their own licentious propensities being the means appointed by Providence for their punishment. It would be to impeach His wisdom and goodness, to regret that we the millions of christian men have been raised up by His hand to succeed the bands of naked savages, who once wandered over, rather than occupied, the fairest regions of the New World.

These, I say, the aboriginal inhabitants of our country, present a ready example of men at the lowest stage of human condition. There is among them not only the absence of Christianity, but of all that cultivation which usually accompanies it in the countries of Europe. For it is the delusion of idle dreamers to imagine there is anything of great or good or wise in the customs or character of the Indians, to be put in competition with the civilization of Europe and America, unless it be that stoic impassionness of theirs under pain or death, which is the result of physical rather than moral causes, and among which causes the destitution, misery, coarseness, and stupor of their ordinary life are not the least prominent. Excepting this, there is nothing in them, which, when regarded in its simple truth, and freed from the optic illusions of the fancy, is comparable to the blessings of civilized life-what they have peculiar, consists chiefly in the absence of those blessings. Doubtless, there may be pointed sayings and striking acts culled from their history; but the very rarity of which chiefly renders these remarkable. And the peculiar barbarism of the red men has its climax in their treatment and estimation of the female sex. Do we admire the patriot hero rendered glorious by his high deeds in the field of battle? I go to the woods to observe 'the feather-cinctured chief' on the war-path, and I detect a vulgar savage, half clad in a rude blanket, his person bedaubed with red earth, skulking around the solitary hamlet, that he may spring upon it in the dark night, to tomahawk its unwarned and defenceless inmates amid the flames of their dwellings ;-or I perceive him returning proudly to his brethren, and laden, not with the arms of a brave foeman won in honorable encounter,

but with the scalps of murdered women and babes, and exhibiting in triumph these disgraceful trophies of his treachery and his cowardice; for it is upon woman and her helpless offspring that the North American Indian, and he alone of all mankind, makes systematic war.-Do we bless the great lawgiver, who lays deep the foundations of the happiness of states, and bequeaths wise institutions to posterity? Where is the lawgiver of the Indian? Ages upon ages had rolled along with him, and he had not yet bethought him of that which is the very beginning of a state, the separate cultivation of the earth; nor was it until our own day, after three hundred years of association with Europeans, that a Cherokee began to apply alphabetic letters to the language of his race.-Do we cherish and honor the man, the husband, the father, who worthily discharges the duties of life in the sphere which God may have assigned to him? Go to the wigwam of the Indian, and you find him weltering in stolid baseness, whilst his wife is a wretched drudge, who tills his cornfield, and carries his burdens, -his servant, his slave, the handmaiden, not as in oriental countries of his luxury and his pleasure, but of his sottishness and his sloth. For woman is with him at once the means of his debasement, and the cause of its continuance. To him, idleness is a principle, not an accident. To her, life is but another name for toil. He will not work, because Nature, which endowed him with superior strength, which gave fierceness to him, and gentleness to her, has enabled him to impose work on her; and to participate in it would, in his estimation, sink him to the level of that sex, which in his mind is the impersonation of lowness and of labor. And you cannot, in my opinion, elevate the Indian above his present degradation, until you teach him, until you compel him, if he will not be taught, to love, to cherish, and to respect woman, alike in peace and

in war.

Such is a true picture of the condition of woman among the unchristianized races of North America. You may object to this, perhaps, that it is an unfair example; that the degradation of the female sex among them arises from their peculiar barbarism of manners, not from the absence of Christianity; and that in a highly civilized, though unchristianized, community, it might be otherwise. The objection is a proper one; and must be met. In doing this, I shall not select the case of a civilized people in which polygamy prevails; though I well