Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 2.djvu/193

Rh States Senate, — a bill deservedly known as the Thayer Bill, from the fact that its original suggestion and its outline and the maturing of its provisions in detail are chiefly due to the labors of Professor James B. Thayer, of the Harvard Law School.

In the present situation to which the course of events just described in outline has led, there are immense areas of land within the United States, belonging to us as a nation, and inhabited by a considerable population, which are now in a condition of lawlessness, mitigated only by arbitrary power. The act of 1885, already referred to, and several other recent statutes, have begun to create exceptions to this statement; but with very slight qualifications in view of such exceptions, it remains true that the most thorough-going anarchist may find the state of society which he desires to establish already in existence upon the reservations. If justice to the Indians would allow it, banishment to a reservation might be the most fitting punishment for a convicted anarchist.

If the numbers or the property of Indians were decreasing, it might be well to consider whether time might not be trusted to put an end to the shameful condition of lawlessness which the government is now maintaining, and, for the lack of proper legislation, is compelled to maintain. But the most careful investigations recently made show that the Indians are increasing in numbers; and a very slight familiarity with the subject will satisfy any one that the property rights of Indians and the pecuniary value of those rights are increasing very rapidly. So far from being "a vanishing subject," the necessity of law for the Indians is one steadily growing, in a geometrical ratio, and it is growing in importance for the whites as well as for the Indians.

Difficulties inherent in the subject will undoubtedly embarrass any attempt to supply this imperative want. The extent of territory and the comparative sparseness of population make the administration of civil or criminal justice expensive; the ignorance of civilized usages and forms of procedure, under which such a people must labor when first subjected to civilized justice, and the antipathies of race and the animosities of warfare, must deprive trial by jury of much of the effectiveness and the confidence necessary to its usefulness; and, perhaps still more serious than these difficulties, the exemption from taxation for many years to come accorded to lands owned by Indians in severalty, while intended to protect