Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/597

Rh blankets, and even of the luxuries of our cities, over the wilderness highways, to be distributed at the agencies to these arrogant paupers, on the plea that their ancestors once roamed free there.

Wise and able men have sometimes found it a serious task to prove the divine right of society, of civilization, of government; but we need not assume, take for granted, and claim deference for the divine right of savagery. At some point in the line of generations this entail of barbarism must be arrested. There is no reason why the successive offspring of our wild hordes should accede to the immunities of their ancestors when the condition of this continent was as wild as their own. The civilizing and humanizing of grown-up savages is declared, yes and proved, to be utterly hopeless and impossible. Even their children brought up in schools and villages will generally take to the woods at the first opportunity; for the flavor and zest of the wilderness are in their blood and tissues and spirits. So the grandchildren, the third generation, alone furnish material for hopeful reclaiming. But the ground of the hope depends upon their grandparents working on their own lands and making the first stages of transition from beastliness.

And there is another, a most cogent, reason why Government should compel the Indians to seek subsistence by labor on their reservations. If not the only, still by far the most effective, security which the Indians can have of retaining these reservations against the encroachments of the whites, now complained of as the chief justification of fresh hostilities, is in putting into them the added value and certified right of improvement, of betterment; the clearing, the dwelling, the well, the fence, the growing crop, — the home. The white man respects these tokens of ownership and possession. If not sacred, they are warnings to him against intrusion and violation. The Mormon settlements, with all their odious institutions, have found