Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/559

Rh of wisdom, — we did not clearly think about or understand what we were doing. A treaty between two nations (and both parties must be nations, sovereigns, in order that they may make treaty relations) proceeds upon certain understood and implied facts, — that both parties stand for the purpose on an equality of rights and dignities; that they thoroughly understand what they are doing; that they have in view joint or mutual advantages, and recognize mutual responsibilities; and that a breach of covenant by either party will justify remonstrance and the use of force, which the other party is supposed to have at command for righting or avenging itself. Now all the forms and pretences of dealing with Indian tribes as independent sovereignties, able to enforce the conditions of a covenant, have been merely farcical. Our authorities have known from the beginning, when authenticating such treaty documents, that the whole proceeding was a ludicrous travesty of the dignified and cautious processes by which we have made our treaties with, for instance, Great Britain, France, and Russia, — nations that could either hold us to terms, or to a reckoning. We may invest with all possible awe and dignity a scene in the forest where white commissioners are holding a council with chieftains of a savage tribe, as the pipe of peace goes round with the grave and taciturn braves; the treaty may be engrossed, signed, and sealed with forest hieroglyphics, — but it is all a mere sham; and it is difficult to believe that the white parties to it did not feel it to be so at the time. No effort of imagination in the civilized party could run any parallel or similitude between the making of a treaty at Ghent, Paris, London, or Washington, as between real nationalities, and the treaty in the woods with grimly painted and greased, blanketed and feathered barbarians, apostrophizing sun and moon in their rhetoric, grunting out their assent or dissent, with an eye to the coming feast and the distribution of the presents. The robed and wigged dignitaries of a court ceremonial