Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/584

564 policy has not been set in such complete administrative authority as to have the ultimate disposal, in ways consistent with its own principles, of all the cases and causes of trouble with the Indians. A gap was left, with an undefined range of authority and responsibility, between the Indian Bureau and the War Department. The Bureau was not sternly restricted to peaceful measures by being told that the Indians were henceforward under its sole charge, whether they proved troublesome or manageable, and that no recourse should for the future be had to military force. On the contrary, it was expressly provided that the military should under some conditions be available and put to service when the Indian Bureau, baffled in its efforts, should fall back upon it.

And so it is pleaded that the Indian Bureau has in effect been a mere clerkship, alike while it was under the Department of War and since it has been under that of the Interior; that it has been subject to a superior, to whom it was bound to report and to look for its limited and cramped powers; and that for a full and fair trial it ought to have been an independent department.

While the friends of the peace policy allow that it has proved a partial failure, its most decided opponents insist that it has proved a complete failure; that its agency has been mischievous and calamitous, vitiated by corruptions, frauds, mismanagement, wasteful outlays and reckless extravagance on the part of greedy and profligate subordinates, contractors, expressmen, and distributors; that it has aggravated all our controversies with the Indians, pauperized them, and made them mercenary and treacherous, while furnishing them with arms and supplies to be used against us; and finally, that the blundering and discomfitures of the peace policy have ended in making it necessary to call in the help of the army, and that too at a great disadvantage arising from the presumption that it was to be dispensed with, and the suspension of its discipline and activity, and its real humiliation.