Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/576

556 furnishes. Then, too, within all the regions most solemnly covenanted to them as reservations on which the whites were forbidden to intrude, the moment the rumor gets abroad that there are mines upon them the explorers, the miners, and the farmers are found to have raised their shanties and then their so-called cities. These facts settle the point that all our future relations with the Indian tribes, instead of starting from non-intercourse with them, must proceed upon a rapidly advancing intimacy, — of dependence on their part, and of generous help on ours. This is a fact which we shall find by and by to have essentially modified the old Indian question.

3. A third facility for wisely and effectively dealing with that question is found in the fact that our Government has, though only so recently, given up the foolish fancy that the Indian tribes are independent and sovereign nations. We have adopted them as wards, — a very interesting and a very troublesome class of dependents, — with quite a precarious and unappraised inheritance claimed by them as invested in our keeping, and likely to cost us in the end a great deal more of our funds than of their own. But this change of their status from a rude independency to an extreme dependency has given us rights in the case which, though we may have usurped, we did not in terms claim, but really renounced, before. We have now the rights of guardianship: we may intermeddle with the internal affairs of the Indians, with their relations to each other; we may restrain them, bring them under a strict and firm control, dictate to them terms and conditions. It must now be with our Government a perfectly open and free question; our own decision of it being absolute, how shall our authority over the Indians be exercised?

This is at present the aspect and import of the Indian question. Our Government — giving over all faltering, hesitancy, and inconstancy of method — has, first of all, to recognize the fact that it has this great question to deal