Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/536

516 foreign aid, and left them for a time wholly to us. If space permitted, very many details might be specified, all indicating aggravations of what might have been the simple responsibility of our Government and the mode of exercising it towards the Indians, had it presented itself wholly free from such complications. Even then the responsibility would have been a very exacting one. But it has never since been wholly freed from these original complications.

There is a widely prevalent opinion, — often avowed as a confession, an admission, or a complaint, and generally acquiesced in, — that our Government, as a government, has been unjust, inhuman, grasping, relentless, and perfidious in its treatment of the Indian tribes with which it has successively come into contact, either in negotiations or in hostilities. That there are obvious and various grounds for this opinion, more or less just, cannot be denied. How far any direct charges, founded on specified instances or cases of such injustice or cruelty, may be met with relief or palliation, would involve a discussion requiring much knowledge and much candor.

Having myself shared in this general opinion of the culpability, misconduct, and even reckless and wantonly intentional injustice of our Government, I am gratified in being able to avow that all the increased knowledge which I have sought and reached on a most complicated and perplexed subject has very much modified the first impressions with which I turned to its full examination. Certainly I feel warranted in making the emphatic assertion that there is no evidence that our Government is justly chargeable at any period with intentional fraud or with heedless indifference to its responsibilities in this matter.

These severe reproaches against our Government, it is to be considered, are made to cover the whole century of its existence and administration, and are said to be as just and applicable in these last past years as ever. In view of them, let me distinctly affirm, that, having myself accepted them