which, erstwhile, was not despised, but was, rather, a mighty bulwark of
the British crown; and pants for the occasion to assert, it may be on the
honour-scroll of the nation's fame, his descent from a vaunted ancestry.




ADDENDA TO SECTION ON ENFRANCHISEMENT.


It will be said, perhaps, that to harbor the idea of the Indian's
elevation, following, in any way, upon his closer assimilation with the
white; his divestiture of the badge of political serfdom, and deliverance
from even the suggestion of thraldom--all of which his enfranchisement
contemplates; or that these would assure, in greater degree, his national
weal, would be to indulge a wild chimera, which could but superinduce
the purest visionary picture of his condition under the operation
of the gift. Some might be found, as well, to discredit the notion
that there would supervene, on the consigning to the limbo of inutile
political systems of the disabling regime that now governs, an epoch,
which would witness the shaking off, by the heavy, phlegmatic red man of
the present, of his dull lethargy, with the casting behind him of former
inaction and unproductiveness; and his being moved to assert a healthy,
genuine, wholesome activity, to be directed to lofty or soulful purpose,
or expressed in high and honourable endeavour. And it might be set down
as a reasoning from the standpoint of an illusory optimism, to look for,
through any change in the Indian's political condition, the incoming of
an age, which should be distinguished by a hopeful and helpful accession
to his character of honesty, uprightness, and self-respect, or by their
conservation; or which should be the natal time for the benign rule