snowdrifts that deepened every moment the weary soldiers dragged themselves along until two hours after midnight, when they reached the tiny village of Wickford.  Nearly one-fourth of their number had been killed or wounded, and many of the latter perished before shelter was reached.  Forty of these were buried at Wickford in the course of the next three days.  Of the Connecticut men eighty were left upon the swamp and in the breach at the rear of the stronghold.  Among the spoils which the victors brought away were a number of good muskets that had been captured by the Nipmucks in their assault upon Deerfield. [Sidenote:  Storming of the great swamp fortress, December 19]

This headlong overthrow of the Narragansett power completely changed the face of things.  The question was no longer whether the red men could possibly succeed in making New England too hot for the white men, but simply how long it would take for the white men to exterminate the red men.  The shiftless Indian was abandoning his squalid agriculture and subsisting on the pillage of English farms; but the resources of the colonies, though severely taxed, were by no means exhausted.  The dusky warriors slaughtered in the great swamp fight could not be replaced; but, as Roger Williams told the Indians, there were still ten thousand white men who could carry muskets, and should all these be slain, he added, with a touch of hyperbole, the Great Father in England could send ten thousand more.  For the moment Williams seems to have cherished a hope that his great influence with the savages might induce them to submit to terms of peace while there was yet a remnant to be saved; but they were now as little inclined to parley as tigers brought to bay, nor was the temper of the colonists a whit less deadly, though it did not vent itself in inflicting torture or in merely wanton orgies of cruelty. [Sidenote:  Effect of the blow]

To the modern these scenes of carnage are painful to contemplate.  In the wholesale destruction of the Pequots, and to a less degree in that of the Narragansetts, the death-dealing power of the white man stands forth so terrible and relentless that our sympathy is for a moment called out for his victim.  The feeling of tenderness toward the weak, almost unknown among savages, is one of the finest products of civilization.  Where murderous emotions are frequently excited, it cannot thrive.  Such advance in humanity as we have made within recent times is chiefly due to the fact that the horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody’s door.  Either war is conducted on some remote frontier, or if armies march through a densely peopled country the conditions of modern warfare have made it essential to their efficiency as military instruments that depredation and riot should be as far as possible checked.  Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as cannibalism.  The mass of citizens