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Having given us this passing glimpse of his first ground, the author proceeds to another, which we take to be totally distinct, though he does not mark the distinction, the right of discovery. The ground first taken is that the occupancy of wandering tribes, who do not mix their labor with the soil, gives them no vested interest in it, and the agriculturalists have a right to invade the country as vacant, and to possess themselves of it, by force. The right of discovery, on the contrary, puts the European claim on the ground that they were Christians, and the aborigines of this country infidels, whom Christians had a right to subdue or extirpate like wild beasts, in the name and by the title of the Redeemer, to whom the dominion of the earth belonged. This pretended right grew out of the wild doctrine of the Crusades, which no Christian writer in modern times has undertaken to defend, but which all enlightened men now and long since have concurred in representing as a dr5eam of fanaticism, engendered by superstition, or the warlike spirit of the age. This right of discovery is one which no man of any intellectual standing has even attempted in this age of light, to maintain against the aborigines of this country, on the ground of natural justice or reason. That these people, who had themselves discovered & possessed this country, from a period beyond the reach of history or even of tradition, should suddenly have their right to it, by the mere circumstance that a subject of Henry the VII of England had sailed along the coast and looked at it from the deck of his ship, is a position so absurd and monstrous, that it requires but to be stated to be rejected by any sound understanding. The right of first discovery was one which the potentates of Europe adopted among themselves for the peaceable settlement of their own respective pretentions on this continent: but it is one which has no natural and just bearing on the claims of the Indians. The character of this right was elaborately and profoundly considered by the Supreme Court in the case of Johnson & McIntoch (2 Wheaton 543) to which our author refers, and we are willing to take the