Page:Removal of the Ponca Indians p16.PNG

 You demand a reparation which, with that responsibility upon me, I consider attended with serious risks and difficulties. I demand a reparation which, in point of principle, is just as good, but which at the same time is to avoid all those risks and difficulties.

In differing from you I am actuated by no pride of opinion. I have shown more than once, when I became aware of having made a mistake, that I did not hesitate to acknowledge and correct it. Such an acknowledgment would be particularly easy in this instance as I was the first to denounce the wrong that was done; and when now my opinion as to what reparation should be made does not agree with that of others, they have no reason to attribute it to mere stubbornness, and certainly not to a want of heart for the suffering Indians. In what I say to you I express my honest conviction under a keen sense of the responsibility I have to bear. It may be called an error of judgment, perhaps, which I think it is not, but nobody has a right to call it anything else. The thought of gross in justice to the Indians is as revolting to me as it is to you, and probably much more so, for my impressions are not owing to a sudden excitement produced by a single case. I have seen large numbers of Indians here in Washington, where they came to express their complaints and their wishes. I have gone to visit them on their reservations and in the wilderness in order to study their needs, and there I have learned to appreciate their good traits, as well as their faults and their helplessness; and I am not ashamed to say that I have conceived for them the hearty sympathy of a personal friend. But that very friendship does not permit me to overlook the dangers and the interests of the many when a wrong done to a few is to be righted, and can be substantially righted without putting the rights of others in peril. When a man in my position has patiently, earnestly, and laboriously studied the Indian problem, when day after day he has watched over the rights and interests of those helpless people as much as any one in his position before, spared no effort to better their condition and accomplished some things at least that promise to endure, he may consider himself entitled to something better than scurrilous abuse or injurious insinuations from decent men.

I deeply regret that an agitation like this appears to have brought about antagonism between those who ought to work harmoniously together for a common end. I do not desire to boast of anything. But when an effort is made to produce the impression as if this Department had during four years devoted itself principally to the business of oppressing the Poncas, I may be pardoned for mentioning some other ends it has endeavored to serve. If those who participate in this agitation will take the trouble to raise their eyes for a moment from that one case which alone they see in the whole Indian question, they would perceive that under this administration many things have been done which de s erve their hearty sympathy and co-operation; they would observe con-