Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/56

36 elements of complication are constantly presenting themselves to perplex the original problem as to what were to be the relations between a barbarous and a civilized people, — the former being in a supposed rightful possession of territory, while the latter, conscious of the power to secure and hold it, have found warrant for its exercise in arguments of natural reason or in interpreting the divine purposes. The substance and shape of the original problem have also been modified by physical and natural agencies, by the trial of experiments and the development of the resources of the country. A tribe of Indians seemingly contented with a treaty stipulation assigning to them a vast expanse of territory, supposed to be adequate to their subsistence in their own mode of life, find their hunting grounds encompassed by the encroachments of the whites on their borders, the game becoming scarce and threatening soon to disappear, while the old forest weapons lose their skill. So the Indians ask for the arms and ammunition of the white men, and for supplies of life which did not form conditions of the compact with them. They become restless on their reservations, even if not interfered with there. In the mean time enterprising white explorers come to the knowledge of the wealth in the streams and bowels of some of those reservations, and on the plea that these vast treasures were not known to exist when the mere wild land was covenanted to a tribe, and that they were not in the bargain, and more than all that they are useless to the Indians, the treaty is trifled with; and the Government, which is not as strong as the people, is forced to be a party to a breach of faith.

While, therefore, statesmanship and philanthropy are in our time forced to face the present Indian question as one for immediate disposal on urgent demands of wisdom and duty, of policy and of right, it is not strange that there should be a divergency of judgment, often manifested in clamor and discord and passion, as to the method and