Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/509

Rh holding their own, nobody would more eagerly advise that course than those at present managing Indian affairs. It would be the greatest possible relief to them as well as to their successors.

I admit that the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory, who for years have had schools, courts of justice, a form of government resembling our own, and are enjoying a certain degree of prosperity, might assume the rights and responsibilities of citizenship without serious danger to themselves, although a majority of even these Indians, as I was informed in my conferences with their leading men, still shrink from those responsibilities. I might say the same of the small number of Indians in other localities, who have gone through the intermediate stages above pointed out until they became more or less able to take care of themselves. These, however, form scarcely more than one-fifth of our whole Indian population. But if you could visit the Sioux, who have just begun the transition, the Comanches, the Kiowas, the Cheyennes, the Shoshonees, the Arrapahoes, the Utes, the Apaches, the Crows, the Assiniboines, the Gros Ventres, the Flatheads and numerous other tribes, and then put to yourself the question whether they, such as they are to-day, should be turned into the struggles of civilized life, without education, without at least some knowledge of a civilized language and of the ways of the world, without having learned how to work and how to provide for the future, without property well secured to them as individuals, simply “to take their chance,” I have not the remotest doubt as to what your answer would be. You would indeed find many of them advancing with a rapidity encouraging the hope that the continuance for some time of a wise and firm guidance in the manner above indicated will enable them to take care of themselves. But you would, I am confident, agree with me in the conclusion