Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/583

Rh upon a military policy in the management of the Indians, simple fairness demands the suggestion here of a qualifying remark. In some quarters unmeasured severity of criticism, even abuse and contempt, have been visited not only upon our Government war policy, but upon the officers, the men, and the conduct of our army in its military operations. This is alike cruelly unjust and ungrateful. The army is the agent and servant of our Government; it acts under orders. It has performed arduous and heroic service, under stern and fearfully exacting and most perilous conditions, enduring every form of hardship, privation, and extremity. It has numbered among its officers men with the breeding, training, and spirit of gentlemen, with humane and Christian hearts; often acting under the stern compulsion of duty, against their own inclinations and convictions. They have maintained discipline over men otherwise untractable, have led them courageously through ambushes and massacres, and have held them in check when restraint was necessary. The army has been the pioneer and security for the advance of civilization. Not a railroad could now traverse the old American Desert, not even a wagon-road, a mail-route, nor a safe foot-trail, without the convoy of that army. The occasion for dispensing with military methods in the management of the Indians is well defined in the future. It will come when the Indians cease to be fighters.

Supposing now that all the arguments and results of trial and experiments adduced against the war policy justified the initiation of the Peace Commission under the Department of the Interior, we listen to what is to be urged against this substituted policy and its workings. The present Indian Bureau, while charging that the war management was and always must be a failure, admits that its own has by no means been wholly successful. If we try, for the sake of impartiality, to stand free of championship of either party, we have to remind ourselves that the peace