The Wife and Child of Osceola

The engraving, furnished by our artist, on the following page, is a suggestive one, and not without interest though the ideas connected with it awaken only feelings of sorrow. It is a melancholy thought to know that the race which once inhabited the pimeval solitudes of our forest, are now passing away from the earth. Though savages, they had many noble qualities to win our admiration and respect; and Wm. Penn's intercourse with them will be a lasting memorial of their faithfulness to a compact in which they were fairly dealt with, and righteously treated. The picture reminds us that the brave chiefs of the forest, who contended so nobly against the whites, did not do so without an object to attain; they had their homes, their wives and children to defend; their domestic ties, their hunting grounds and the graves of their ancestors, which they held sacred, called forth their mightiest energies against the invaders. Though savages, they were not devoid of those common instincts of humanity which are the inalienable characteristics of the race, and which bind in one universal brotherhood, the nations of the earth. The engraving represents the family of one of the Seminole chiefs, who fought so desperately against our nation through the Florida War. Much has been said of the manifest destiny of the civilized nations to subdue and destroy the savage ones; but we cannot believe in an irresistible destiny which is carried forward with the wrong oppression and injustice which has ever marked the path of the powerful against the weak. But the weak have not always been without their revenge. Look at those poor Seminoles, a band of less than a thousand brave warriors. What gave them the power to contend so long as they did, against the mighty energies of our nation? “Truly the race is not always with the swift, nor the battle with the strong;” and they taught us a lesson we should long remember; they taught that the most powerful nation is but weak in an unrighteous and aggressive warfare, and that the weakest are comparatively powerful when defending their homes and their soil. Most nobly did they defend their's through a series of years, costing us many millions of money, and many thousands of lives, and we distinctly recollect that there were accusations against our nation of measures of treachery and baseness, which were at last resorted to, to subdue them. We have a later unrighteous and aggressive war of our nation in our mind, which was a series of brilliant successes; but they were won it at an immense expenditure of money and loss of life, and had it been protracted as long the Seminole war, at the same ratio of expense, it would have ruined the nation. Our rulers foresaw and were prudent enough to purchase a peace for a sum large enough to have settled every thing in dispute at the commencement of the difficulty. The welfare and best interests of our nation are not to be advanced by warfare but by peace; and every good citizen should denounce an aggressive spirit as tending to its ruin; no wars should be tolerated but those actually necessary to drive invaders from our soil.