Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/268

248 into view the fact that having once received them and turned them to account they ever after come to depend upon them, clamoring in impatience for the supply, — we may estimate the service of the white man to the Indian. Nor must the statement be omitted that last year, for example, the Government spent more than a million of dollars for Indians not in reservations, nor under treaty with it. These facts, anticipatory of later discussions, are noticed here as having a bearing upon the virtual right of the Indian tenure of land, as recognized by the favors extended by the whites.

It is hardly to be supposed that any humane or ideal pleader for the rights of the red man would affirm that his heritage of this whole continent, when first visited by white men, should have been regarded and respected as inalienably belonging to him for all time to come, not to be encroached upon or shared with those who could make a better use of it. It can hardly be conceived that regions of a globe of very moderate size, — seemingly the only orb in the universe available for the subsistence, expansion, and development of the human race, or at least the only one which we at present can occupy, — instead of being turned to account by millions of happy civilized beings, should be held for all time as reserved to be coursed over by a few thousand savages. Is it reasonable to maintain that one or several annual visits and roamings over a vast extent of wild territory — lakes and forests — by a group or a tribe of hunters conferred ownership, superiority, or even priority of claim to it? Why, even the pre-emptive right, the first claim to the right, of a purchaser of soil under our Government, is secured only by betterments and improvements on and below its surface. The formality and rigidness of legal exactions by which civilized peoples regulate the ownership and transmission of titles to land, is of itself an indication, and to some extent a justification, of the exceedingly slender claim of tenure which they would allow