Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/228

208 of the natives may be said — through pensions, supplies, or gratuities — to share in the favors of our Government, or, as one may view the matter, in compensation for the losses and wrongs suffered by them from the whites.

It is computed that some fifteen hundred thousand square miles of our territory are settled by a thriving population on homesteads, pursuing peacefully all the occupations of industry and thrift. Nearly fifty million acres have been given by the Government as largesses to railroads, for their services in advancing surveys and opening the country. Other tracts of territory have been deeded for educational and agricultural institutions, and as bounties or pensions to soldiers. There are estimated to be about two billions of acres of public lands, more or less perfectly surveyed and explored, in possession of the Government.

Our Government, representing a people that has well-nigh dispossessed and displaced the original occupants of our present domain, is for the present time under covenants, with various terms and conditions, to hold some one hundred and thirty patches of this territory, as reservations, for the sole ownership and use of native tribes. About one hundred and fifty-six millions of acres, or two hundred and forty-three thousand square miles, are thus covenanted.

I have just used the limitation, for the present time, with a reason. Many of those treaty covenants embrace the solemn phrase “for ever,” as extending the term for which they were to be binding. But experience has shown that that phrase is practically inapplicable, and has to be qualified, reduced, and taken as limitable; just as, in the discussions of theologians and scripturists, the same phrase applied to the duration of future retributive punishment is argued by many to mean less than endlessness in the lapse of time. An examination of a digest of all the treaty covenants made by the Government with Indian tribes during its century of existence, will show very many revisions and annulments of them, from necessity,