Properly speaking, therefore, it is not the Europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of America; it is famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction which had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are indebted to modern discovery! [Footnote f: "The Indians," say Messrs.

Clarke and Cass in their Report to Congress, p.

15, "are attached to their country by the same feelings which bind us to ours; and, besides, there are certain superstitious notions connected with the alienation of what the Great Spirit gave to their ancestors, which operate strongly upon the tribes who have made few or no cessions, but which are gradually weakened as our intercourse with them is extended.

'We will not sell the spot which contains the bones of our fathers,' is almost always the first answer to a proposition for a sale."] It is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which attend these forced emigrations.

They are undertaken by a people already exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the newcomers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which receive them with jealous hostility.