Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/587

Rh wise, efficient, and hopeful of every end of peace and justice. But it shall be resolutely and forcibly insisted on and advanced, so as to allow of that element of a war policy (which we may admit is coercion), compulsion. If under some circumstances we may rightfully use the forces of war, we certainly may put to service the constraining forces of peace. We have had in quite recent years a series of frightful and awful catastrophes in our Indian warfare which we call massacres, that word being appropriated to acts of savage cruelty perpetrated by the red men. Try to probe to the bottom the truth, as to cause, occasion, provocation, responsibility, in any one of those appalling feats of desperation. Take the relations of frontier settlers, of railroad working parties, of miners, of emigrants in transitu, of the occupants of army posts, of military officers, and of investigating committees at Washington. And remember that the Indian side of the story is seldom reported to us; and when it is, is apt to come in different and disputed versions. The variance between the accounts which we receive of these aggressions of the Indians reaches even to the extent of referring them in their occasion or impulse to the wanton provocation of the military officers on the one hand, and on the other to the folly or mismanagement of the peace policy. An impartial investigator of the facts in any such case might be disposed to decide that any excess of force which was employed by the armed party might have been put to good use as energy, compulsion, and coercion on the side of philanthropy.

The basis of the actual relation of our Government to the Indians we find to be that of full, even arbitrary, power to dictate a policy, to choose and impose the terms by which we will henceforward deal with them. It is well for us to start with this conscious possession of power, for with it goes as full responsibility in its exercise. And how shall we use it? We have a full — and if not an unquestioned,