Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/589

Rh their view as a stout and resolute conviction, after a long and thorough acquaintance with the whole subject, and a sharp scrutiny of the tendency and inevitable result of all existing influences. Very many military men most skilled in the nature and habits of the Indians, and best acquainted with the probabilities of the future for them, have boldly spoken the word, The fate of the Indian race is extermination, or at least extinction. We are all familiar with the brief sentence of one of our foremost generals, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” We are at liberty, however, to put a gloss upon the sentence, as meaning that the Indian quality must be killed out of a savage before he can be called “good.” Besides those who so startlingly but frankly avow this stern and dire conclusion, there are many more who hold it as a secret persuasion of what is inevitable. Though such persons may really prefer and plead for the gentle, forbearing, fostering efforts of a peace policy, they all the while have a misgiving, or inner assurance, that it will be vain; that the Indian, as he cannot be humanized and civilized, must yield to extinction of race. The reasons offered for this hopeless view of the fate of the Indian have been recognized in another connection. This is not the place to discuss it or to argue about it. Yet reference may here be made incidentally to one element which would come into a full discussion. One of the reasons offered for the hopeless inefficiency of the peace policy is the enormous expense, already felt as a burden to the nation, of supporting hundreds of thousands of Indians as paupers of the most abject and profitless sort, and who are not likely to be anything other than paupers, steadily deteriorating and becoming more clamorous, lazy, drunken, and dangerous. The nation, it is said, is becoming weary of this waste, with its complicated system of agents, superintendents, guardians, teachers, and fraudulent traders, and with an ultimate necessity of calling in the military when the philanthropist and missionary are baffled. Now, as to this matter of