Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/511

Rh responsibilities as well as rights must be the ultimate end and not the initial point of the solution of the problem. And it is by promoting this preparatory work, I respectfully suggest, that a movement like that inaugurated in Boston, can make itself most beneficent, and a genuine blessing to the Indian.

As to the Ponca case, which seems to have given the immediate impulse to your movement, it is scarcely necessary to repeat what I have already stated on several occasions: that this removal was effected in pursuance of a law passed before the incoming of the present Administration; that my first official report as well as that of the present Commissioner of Indian Affairs set forth the wrong done to the Poncas before that wrong was taken any notice of by the public, and that since then this Department has done all it could do under the law, by mere administrative action, to indemnify them for that wrong. I may add however that, had I then personally seen their old reservation on the Missouri, and especially their so-called houses there as I have since, I might have drawn the picture of their losses less strongly. I may assure you also that there is absolutely no wish nor interest here adverse to the welfare of the Poncas. It is, as I stated in this year's report, a matter of grave doubt, whether under present circumstances a removal back to their old reserve would not have, in a practical point of view, rather an injurious than a beneficial effect upon their future. Were you acquainted with those circumstances in detail, you would probably share that doubt.

I cannot advise you concerning the manner in which you can take their case to the Supreme Court. The question whether an appeal from the well-known decision of Judge Dundy on the application for a writ of habeas corpus is to be prosecuted by the Government or withdrawn, although the first steps in that direction were taken at the time, is