Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/596

576 labor on their reservations must be the prime and overruling condition. And actual compulsion will be justifiable in the process, as much with reference to the real security and welfare of the Indians as for any ends of our own. Nor must we fear lest this course be inconsistent with an approved peace policy. The laxness of the peace policy — its slack and halting and indulgent weakness — is not only a plausible, but it is a reasonable and forcible, ground for insisting, as many do, upon some indispensable element of the war policy. The Indians compel their squaws to work, and the squaws obey. No women on the face of this earth — in factory, mine, kitchen, or field — are more laboriously tasked with burden and toil than are those squaws. The very sight of one of them — haggard, bent, and shrivelled before middle life — tells the whole tale. If the men would labor as they compel the squaws to labor, on their rich and easy soil, with timber and much game still at hand, they would not need the dole of Government rations, though they do need our implements and tools.

Now, just as the men compel the women to work, so let Government stiffly impose the same obligation on the men. On this whole broad continent, now belted round with the processes and fruits of civilization and coursed by the highways of transit and traffic, no barbarous hordes can expect to cover themselves in its inner depths in savagery, indolence, or thriftlessness, drawing a precarious subsistence from skimming the earth's surface products, while the wild beasts, as they annually waste under the chase, might give them a hint that they too must vanish as wild men.

It is preposterous to suppose that some two or three hundred thousands of these idle-roving bands should from year to year be fed and armed and clothed and petted in their wastefulness and improvidence at the charge of the laboring classes of the civilized. Absurd as a spectacle, and outrageous as an imposition on the toilers of our country, is the transporting of grains and meats and guns and