It is really lamentable to see how utterly empty was the pretence of reformation in the government of England at that time. How utterly ignorant or regardless Protestant England was of the most sacred and unmistakeable truths of the New Testament, while it professed to model itself upon them. The worst principles of the papal church were clung to, because they favoured the selfishness of despotism. The rights of nations were as infamously and recklessly violated; and from that time to this, Protestant England and Protestant America continue to spurn every great principle of Christian justice in their treatment of native tribes: they have substituted power for conscience, gunpowder and brandy for truth and mercy, and expulsion from their lands and houses for charity, “that suffereth long and is kind.”
The shameless impudence and hypocrisy by which nations calling themselves Christians have ever persisted, and still persist, in this sweeping and wholesale public robbery and violence, was happily ridiculed by Churchill.
Cast by a tempest on a savage coast, Some roving buccaneer set up a post; A beam, in proper form, transversely laid, Of his Redeemer’s cross the figure made,— Of that Redeemer, with whose laws his life, From first to last, had been one scene of strife; His royal master’s name thereon engraved, _Without more process the whole race enslaved_; _Cut off that charter they from Nature drew_, _And made them slaves to men they never knew_! Search ancient histories, consult records, Under this title the _most Christian Lords_, Hold,—thanks to conscience—more than half the ball;— O’erthrow this title, they have none at all.
But the national cupidity that was proof to the caustic ridicule of Churchill, has been proof to the still more powerful assault of public execration, under the growth of Christian knowledge. The Bible is now in almost every man’s hand; its burning and shining light blazes full on the grand precept, “Do as thou would’st be done by;” and are the tribes of India, or Africa, or America, or Oceanica, the better for it? Are they not still our slaves and our Gibeonites, and driven before our arms like the wild beasts of the desert? We need not therefore stay to express our abhorrence of Spanish cruelty, or describe at great length the deeds of own countrymen in any quarter of the globe,—it is enough to say that English and American treatment of the aborigines of their colonies is but Spanish cruelty repeated. With one or two beautiful exceptions, which we shall have the greatest pleasure in pointing out, no more regard has been paid to the rights or the feelings of the North American Indians by the English and their descendants, than was paid to the South Americans by the Spanish and Portuguese.