were drained? why but to keep off the depressing effects of the
malaria of swamps and new clearings, which told on them--who
always settled in the lowest grounds--in the shape of fever and
ague? Here it may be answered again that stimulants have been,
during the memory of man, the destruction of the Red Indian race
in America. I reply boldly that I do not believe it. There is
evidence enough in Jacques Cartier's "Voyages to the Rivers of
Canada;" and evidence more than enough in Strachey's "Travaile in
Virginia"--to quote only two authorities out of many--to prove
that the Red Indians, when the white man first met with them,
were, in North and South alike, a diseased, decaying, and, as all
their traditions confess, decreasing race. Such a race would
naturally crave for "the water of life," the "usquebagh," or
whisky, as we have contracted the old name now. But I should have
thought that the white man, by introducing among these poor
creatures iron, fire-arms, blankets, and above all, horses
wherewith to follow the buffalo-herds, which they could never
follow on foot, must have done ten times more towards keeping them
alive, than he has done towards destroying them by giving them the
chance of a week's drunkenness twice a year, when they came in to
his forts to sell the skins which, without his gifts, they would
never have got.

Such a race would, of course, if wanting vitality, crave for
stimulants. But if the stimulants, and not the original want of
vitality, combined with morals utterly detestable, and worthy only
of the gallows--and here I know what I say, and dare not tell what
I know, from eye-witnesses--have been the cause of the Red
Indians' extinction, then how is it, let me ask, that the Irishman
and the Scotsman have, often to their great harm, been drinking as