Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/593

Rh arbitrariness. Let a citizen of one of our oldest and most prosperous towns or villages reflect how his natural liberty is circumscribed; how his inclinations, habits, acts, and range of self-indulgence are under surveillance; how the police and the tax-gatherer scan him, and how the law often bleeds him. One half of all our citizens at one time, and the other half at another time, utter chronic complaints of oppression and tyranny. We need have no scruples, therefore, as to the use of positive and constraining authority over the Indians. Of the need of this we find assurance when we take into view the following statement. Large numbers of Indians now under our control, according to the season of the year and other circumstances, present themselves to us in these three very different characters: First, as under our discipline, training, and instruction, through farmers and teachers residing with them, to make them self-dependent; second, as swarms of vagabond paupers coming to the distributing agents for a year's dole of clothing, food, arms, ammunition, and implements; third, as having wastefully exhausted their supplies, and, when the season favors, rushing out with the arms which we have given them, in war or predatory parties. Here we have the same interesting and versatile fellow-citizens acting yearly in the roles of pupils, paupers, enemies, or prisoners of war. We must insist upon their keeping one of those three characters the year through, and we must decide which it shall be. It is no longer binding upon us to feed them in idleness through three quarters of the year on their reservations, and then to allow them to rush out on pretence of hunting, but really to prowl and plunder. A large proportion of their lands is of the very finest dower of the continent, with loam a yard deep, with succulent grasses on which cattle may graze all the year, with heavy timber, with noble millstreams, with native fruits and roots, and with a glorious climate. When one thinks of the generations of our old New England stock, who contrived to live and prosper over