America is bound scrupulously to respect the rights of the weak; but she is no less bound to make stalwart insistance on her own rights as against the strong.
Their Treachery towards Both the Indians and the Americans.
The count against the British on the Northwestern frontier is, not that they insisted on their rights, but that they were guilty of treachery to both friend and foe.

The success of the British was incompatible with the good of mankind in general, and of the English-speaking races in particular; for they strove to prop up savagery, and to bar the westward march of the settler-folk whose destiny it was to make ready the continent for civilization.

But the British cannot be seriously blamed because they failed to see this.

Their fault lay in their aiding and encouraging savages in a warfare which was necessarily horrible; and still more in their repeated breaches of faith.

The horror and the treachery were the inevitable outcome of the policy on which they had embarked; it can never be otherwise when a civilized government endeavors to use, as allies in war, savages whose acts it cannot control and for whose welfare it has no real concern.
Doubtless the statesmen who shaped the policy of Great Britain never deliberately intended to break faith, and never fully realized the awful nature of the Indian warfare for which they were in part responsible; they thought very little of the matter at all in the years which saw the beginning of their stupendous struggle with France.