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with equal warmth, the transatlantic Solon cries-What, give up our lands, acquired by the most unexceptionable title! Why, they were purchased by treaty from the Indians! Now, which position does Mr. Madison mean to stand to? Have the Indians rights, or have they not? Can they contract-can they exercise sovereignty—can they act as an independent people? If all this be answered in the affirmative, then we are right in protecting their interests as those of allies in the war; if in the negative, then on what footing stands the Treaty of Greenville; or how could people incapable of possessing a territorial title make over such title to the United States? The truth seems to be, this:Savage and undomesticated tribes do not possess the same solid title to the territories over which they wander, as nations do, which acknowledge and confirm by laws among themselves the individual appropriation of landed possessions. Contracts made with them in good faith may, indeed, be held valid, when the interests of no third party intervene: but here is such intervention. The very existence of Canada is at stake. The right of external aggrandisement among civilised nations is limited by the common safety. In this view, we do not hesitate to say, that not only the transfer of lands by the United States from the Indians is nugatory; but the purchase of Louisiana to them by Buonaparte was, in point of public right, an absolute nullity.

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British sine qua non abandoned.1

There was also an influence which we once possessed over the minds of our Indian allies, and which in war and in peace we have found to be of no mean value. We are told with respect to the latter, that there is a stipulation (how to be enforced we know not) that they are to be restored to all the possessions, rights and privileges, which they enjoyed, or were entitled to, before 1812: that between 1795 and 1812 the boundary line of the Indians remained undisturbed; and consequently that they are thus reinstated in all of the advantages of the treaty of Greenville, concluded in 1795. But the Treaty of Greenville was only

'The Times, London, December 31, 1814: Editorial Comment.

the result of a long series of systematic encroachments of the American Government on the Indians, on whom it imposed certain slavish conditions so injurious to British traders, as to give occasion to the explanatory article of May, 1796. The forbearance of the Americans between 1795 and 1812, is so far from being true, that during the whole of that period, they continued their encroachments and fraudulent purchases—giving a farthing per acre for lands, and immediately selling them for six dollars per acre-establishing trading posts, and converting them at will into military stations— in fine, prohibiting British traders, and seizing their property without a shadow of authority. Some American writers ingeniously defend all this, as flowing from the natural and necessary superiority of civilised over savage nations; but if so, surely we ought to come in for our share; for we are at least equally civilised with Mr. Madison's friends, and our provinces lie just as convenient for annexation and pillage. On the other hand, if we mean really to protect the rights of our Indian Allies, we ought not to turn them over to some future arrangement between themselves and Mr. Madison, which is like setting an infant to play piquet with a professed gamester; but we should insist on being parties to the agreement, and guarantees of its execution. If we have improvidently neglected the interests of the Indians, how much more have we neglected those of the Colonists.

The anticipated effect of the Treaty.1

* We demanded that the Indians who had joined us as Allies should be included in our treaty of peace. No, say the Americans, those Indians are persons living within our territory. It is inconsistent with the law of nations to suffer the interposition of a foreign Power in the relations between the acknowledged Sovereign of the territory, and the Indians situated (residing) upon it. The law of nations is a very useful phrase in most of the American arguments; but unfortunately their edition of that law is so peculiarly their own that we know not how to consult it with any degree of reliance on its accuracy. Where is this pretended article of national law (fabricated solely for the North American

1The Times, London, February 1, 1815: Editorial Comment.

Indians) to be found? We take those persons to be individuals living on a territory which they call their own. Suppose that we had expressly described it in the Treaty of 1783 as belonging to the United States, would our admission at all affect the right of the Indians? But the treaty of Greenville is relied on as containing the admission of the Indians themselves. It does no such thing. It contains an agreement that they will live under the protection of the United States, and nothing more. Far from acknowledging the rights of sovereignty and soil to be in the other contracting party, it expressly stipulates, that the Indians shall enjoy their lands so long as they please; and if they ever yield them to the United States it shall be by sale.

But whatever the treaty of 1783 or the treaty of 1795 may have said, the war of 1812 entirely annulled those treaties. That war, so wantonly and so wickedly provoked by Mr. Madison, was a flame which shrivelled up all his diplomatic parchment; and the Indians occupying the territory in question had a perfect right to reassume its sovereignty if they had before yielded it up, or to continue its exercise if they retained it; and in either case we were fully authorized to recognize such their sovereignty, any law, statute, or ordinance, in Mr. Madison's newfangled code, notwithstanding.

One would wonder how the American diplomatists could have had the assurance to deny our right to consider the Indians as our allies when the American government actually threatened to retaliate on our officers and soldiers the cruelties of the Indians, on the plea of such alliance. What! I am to be tortured to death on account of my connection with a certain body of men, and yet I am not to dare to take upon myself any concern in the interest of those men! Matchless absurdity! In truth, the honour of Great Britain was most deeply engaged to the Indians; and to betray and give them up, as we have done, was the height of baseness, as Mr. Jonathan Russell and his colleagues well knew, and for that very reason they so strenuously urged us to a conduct at once impolitic and disgraceful. We say the Indians are betrayed in being left to such stipulations and arrangements as Mr. Madison and his gang will make with them, which will undoubtedly be ten times more knavish and ruinous than the bargains which the Jew attornies and Jew agents make with the drunken sailors at the back of the point of Portsmouth for their prizemoney. Yet

it is pompously set forth that we have "provided for the interests of our Indian allies." Yes-as the lamb is provided for, by being entrusted to the guardianship of the wolf.

A second argument is that neither the affairs of the Indians, nor the military possession of the Lakes, had any relation to the subsisting differences between Great Britain and the United States.

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He [Madison] had not the most distant idea of calling upon the Indians living within our territories to take up the hatchet against us. No, to be sure; but in point of fact, he did attack Canada: in point of fact, he did attempt to stir up an Indian war. Then the safety of our provinces, and the situation of the neighbouring Indians, became, by his act and deed, matters of subsisting difference between us. * * *

The Status of the Negotiations.1

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What these advantages are, it is not necessary very minutely to explain. They amount, in one word, to a demand for a cession of territory; and the war which is now going on is neither more nor less than a war for the conquest of that territory. By the treaty of 1783, the boundary line between the United States and Canada was settled with the utmost precision; and for the greater part of it was made to run through the centre of the great chain of lakes, and their connecting waters, with a joint right of navigation to both parties. The territory of certain Indian tribes, who are now dignified with the name of our Allies, is within the country then solemnly ceded to America, in so far as England had any power to cede it,-in the same way as the territory occupied by many other Indian tribes was included in the country then finally ceded to England. We now insist on the exclusive military occupation of all those waters on a guarantee for the perpetual inviolability and independence of the territory of our Indian Allies—and on the unqualified and absolute cession, without compensation, of a part of the state of Massachusetts.

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1Edinburgh Review, Vol. 24, p. 251 (Nov.-Feb., 1814-1815).

British Comment on the Treaty.1

"The Treaty of Ghent was this day ratified by the

Prince Regent in Council at Carlton House,"

The Globe adds, that the following is understood to be the

substance of the treaty:

1. All discussion of our maritime rights waived on both sides.

2. Mr. Madison does not insist on giving up the prizes captured

in retaliation of the Berlin and Milan Decrees.

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3. We leave our Indian Allies as we found them in 1812. The 11th [evident error as it refers to 9th] article of the present Treaty secures the Indians in the rights to which they were entitled to before the war, and Great Britain becomes the guarantee of those rights.2

Before the Treaty was signed, there is reason to believe that the Congress of Vienna had terminated its arduous labors in the re-establishment of the equilibrium of Europe; consequently forming the basis of a durable peace in that portion of the globe, without taking any notice whatever of the war between Great Britain and the United States. This is what we anticipated, and this is what we suppose to have urged the American Commissioners to patch up a treaty of Peace, by which their country can lose nothing even if the Ratification should be refused by Mr. Madison. Indeed there might be strong reasons laid down to imagine the whole a systematic trick on the part of the Commissioners, by instructions from their unprincipled masters. In the mean while let us make a few anticipations on the conditions of this treaty. The first pretentions of the British Commissioners regarding the Indian boundary appear to have been given up in the conferences of October. * * * We dare say the British triumvirate would in a moment nod assent, thereby exposing our Indian Allies and Upper Canada as much as ever to the future inroads of American ambition.3 * * *

In our last we expressed our surprize that the Plenipotentiaries in settling the peace had not corrected the expressed course of the

'Philadelphia Gazette, February 14, 1815. From the New York Gazette of February 13, copied from the London Globe of December 27, 1814. "Philadelphia Gazette, March 28, 1815. Canada Papers, Quebec, March 2. New York Herald, March 4, 1815, From the Montreal Herald of February 18, 1815.

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