Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/263

Rh with complaints of the white man's fences at Plymouth; the savages on our ever-shifting frontiers complain that the white man's surveying parties, engineers, and miners frighten off his game on plains and mountains, — and the white man tells the Indian that if he cannot give up his game he must go with it. All the theories about the rights of savage occupants of unimproved territory, all the principles of natural law argued out by the most accomplished publicists, yield to the pressure of practical expediency and of the action of another series of laws developed from human activity. Most of those who have had to recognize and deal with the undefined rights of the savages in the tenure of land have known nothing at all of these theories and principles of natural law. Those who have known more or less about them, and who might have been expected as statesmen or lawyers to have had some regard for them, have found them set aside by such a prevailing force of practical defiances or obstructions of them that they have quietly allowed them to fall into abeyance as inoperative. No upright and candid man, magistrate, colonist, army officer, member of Congress, or simple pioneer, would ever have stoutly denied that the Indians were entitled to some sort of a heritage here; but in all the pages referring more or less directly to the subject which have passed under my eye, I have never met with a clearly defined and positive, however limited, statement of what precisely that right was and is. Nor would such a statement even in the form of a legal definition, and allowed as a precedent, have proved practically to carry authority with it, as it would in all cases be held to be subject to the qualification that it must in no case permanently impair the prerogative of civilization over barbarism.

According to the natural features and products of different regions, competent authorities have made and warranted this estimate, — that an extent of from six thousand to fifty thousand acres (that is, more than seven square