Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/592

572 any fair purchase-price from the first, — just as the cost of our nation's fight for freedom would twice over have bought all slaves at their market value, and would have set them up with houses and farms. Yet we have to contemplate for long years to come a drain upon our resources in addition to the appropriations for army and navy, for postal service and internal improvements, and all other specifications on the budget, an annual outlay, likely for many years to augment rather than to diminish, for teachers, implements, instrumentalities and agencies of every kind for turning some two hundred thousand barbarians into — whatever it may prove that we can make of them.

Incident to the possession of the full power of superiority and authority which our Government has and may exercise towards the Indians, we have a full right, by our own best wisdom, and then even by compulsion, to dictate terms and conditions to them; to use constraint and force; to say what we intend to do, and what they must and shall do. If we are the wiser, this is our right; if our intentions are kind and just, this is our obligation; if the cost of success or failure falls upon us, this is our assurance and venture. This rightful power of ours will relieve us from conforming to, or even consulting to any troublesome extent, the views and inclinations of the Indians whom we are to manage. A vast deal of folly and mischief has come of our attempts to accommodate ourselves to them, to humor their whims and caprices, to indulge them in their barbarous ways and their inveterate obstinacy. Henceforward they must conform to our best views of what is for their good. The Indian must be made to feel that he is in the grasp of a superior, whose aim is to bring out his own manhood, and to give him self-reliance. In our loose and lenient way of exercising authority over the Indians, even when they consent to submit to it, we seem to have forgotten what a large and essential part of control and government in the most civilized communities is of the very essence of compulsion, almost of