Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/555

Rh conflict with my own former impressions, I have been brought to admit that the intent and purpose of the United States have always been to recognize the supreme obligations of humanity towards the Indians, to protect them, and to be even lavishly generous towards them. Efforts and outlays in these behalfs are testified to in our State papers and in the records of Congress. Inquiries and investigations, commissions, councils, invitations, and visits of Indian chiefs and warriors to Washington and other cities, protracted debates in Congress, and the appropriation of large sums of money, are evidences of right purposes; and they have not been hypocritical. Philanthropic and religious men have been sent with large gifts at the public expense to give a continual hearing to Indian grievances, and even to humor, as well as to conciliate, those who exposed them. Tentative and experimental schemes and shifts, ingenious and temporizing, have been put on trial. And, finally, military forces have been sent among the Indians, not by any means merely to kill them, but also to defend them from each other, and to protect them against wrongs from the white man. Yet none the less, practically and in effect, all these wise and kind intents and efforts have been thwarted, and we have to allow that the Indians have received from us treatment outrageous, iniquitous, and perfidious.

Still we have to say that the inherent difficulties of the problem have baffled the most consummate statesmanship. The sagacity and grasp of mind exercised by our statesmen in our Constitution, and more than one display of wisdom and shrewdness in our diplomacy, have won the encomiums of the civilized world. But this one problem — how to deal rightly and wisely with our joint inheritors of territory broad enough for us all — has not yielded to the mastery of our statesmanship. Are the difficulties in the case inherent and insuperable; or have we invented and intensified them ourselves?