The Natchez, having accomplished this destruction, were astonished to find that not one of their allies had stirred; and the allies were equally astonished at the rising of the Natchez, whilst they had yet several pieces of wood remaining. The French, however, in the other parts of the country, were saved; fresh reinforcements arrived from Europe, and the unfortunate Natchez felt all the fury of their vengeance. Part were put to the sword; great numbers were caught and sent to St. Domingo, as slaves; the rest fled for safety into the country of the Chickasaws. The Chickasaws were called upon to give them up; but they had more sense of honour and humanity than Europeans,—they indignantly refused; and, when the French marched into their territories, to compel them by force, bravely attacked and repelled them, with repeated loss. As in Canada, Madagascar, India, and other places, the French reaped no permanent advantage from their treachery and cruelties, as the other European nations did. Louisiana was eventually ceded, in 1762, to the Spaniards, just as the French families, from Nova Scotia, Canada, St. Vincent, Granada, and other colonies won by the English, were flocking into it as a place of refuge. They had all the odium and the crime of aboriginal oppression, and left the earth so basely obtained, to the enjoyment of others no better than themselves.
The man who finds an unknown country out, By giving it a name, acquires, no doubt, A gospel title, though the people there The pious Christian thinks not worth his care. Bar this pretence, and into air is hurled, The claim of Europe to the _Western World_.
We shall now have to deal entirely with our own nation, or with those principally derived from it. We shall now have to observe the conduct entirely of Protestants towards the aborigines of their settlements: and the Catholic may ask with triumphant scorn, “Where is the mighty difference between the ancient professors of our faith, and the professors of that faith which you proudly style the reformed! You accuse the papal church of having corrupted and debased national morality in this respect,—in what does the morality of the Protestants differ?” I am sorry to say in nothing. The Protestants have only too well imitated the conduct and clung to the doctrine of the Catholics as it regards the rights of humanity. It is to the disgrace of the papal church that it did not inculcate a more Christian morality; it is to the far deeper disgrace of Protestants, that, pretending to abandon the corruptions and cruelties of the papists, they did not abandon their wretched pretences for seizing upon the possessions of the weak and the unsuspecting. So far, however, from the behaviour of, the Protestants forming a palliation for that of the Catholics, it becomes an aggravation of it; for it is but the ripened fruit of that tree of false and mischievous doctrine which they had planted. They had set the example, and boldly preached the right, and pleaded the divine sanction for invasion, oppression, and extermination—such example and exhortation are only too readily adopted—and the Protestant conduct was but the continuation of papal heresy. The