In its essence, and viewed from the standpoint of abstract morality, their attitude was that of the freebooter.  The backwoodsmen lusted for the possessions of the Indian, as the buccaneers of the Spanish main had once lusted for the possessions of the Spaniard.  There was but little more heed paid to the rights of the assailed in one case than in the other.

    The Ethics of Such Territorial Conquest.

Yet in its results, and viewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind.  It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable.  Huge tomes might be filled with arguments as to the morality or immorality of such conquests.  But these arguments appeal chiefly to the cultivated men in highly civilized communities who have neither the wish nor the power to lead warlike expeditions into savage lands.  Such conquests are commonly undertaken by those reckless and daring adventurers who shape and guide each race’s territorial growth.  They are sure to come when a masterful people, still in its raw barbarian prime, finds itself face to face with a weaker and wholly alien race which holds a coveted prize in its feeble grasp.

Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil.  This is, of course, a shortsighted view.  In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples.  It is useless to try to generalize about conquests simply as such in the abstract; each case or set of cases must be judged by itself.  The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end.  Nothing but sheer evil has come from the victories of Turk and Tartar.  This is true generally of the victories of barbarians of low racial characteristics over gentler, more moral, and more refined peoples, even though these people have, to their shame and discredit, lost the vigorous fighting virtues.  Yet it remains no less true that the world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement or submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years.  Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction and suffering of hideous woe and misery.  It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should of necessity be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people.  That they are in truth birth-pangs does not lessen the grim and hopeless woe of the race supplanted; of the race outworn or overthrown.  The wrongs done and suffered cannot be blinked.  Neither can they be allowed to hide the results to mankind of what has been achieved.