Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/491

 other high officers also, whose frequent and severe campaigns in the late Indian wars gave much weight to their opinions.

The underlying support of this proposition was the conviction that the Indian could never be civilized and that the only possible solution of the problem which he embodied was to confine him, under strict military supervision, on reservations from which all uplifting contact with white men was barred, till he should become extinct by virtue of his own incurable barbarism. Such a general view of the matter Mr. Schurz confessed he himself held when he entered the Interior Department. But additional study changed his opinion. From the good and wise men of various religious denominations whom Grant's policy had brought into co-operation with the Indian Bureau, notably William Welsh of Philadelphia, the Secretary soon learned how much of hope and of achievement was bound up in the peace policy. He became the supporter and the efficient leader of those who wished to maintain and develop the old system.

In the autumn and winter of 1877 a joint committee of Congress investigated at length the feasibility of transferring the Indians to the War Department. Mr. Schurz appeared on December 6th, and presented a statement which summed up in his most effective manner the case for the status quo. He announced his conviction that the proper policy in dealing with the Indians was that of guiding them to the practice of agriculture or grazing on their reservations, as a first step toward self-support and toward the occupation of the land in severalty. Education should begin, with the other instrumentalities of civilization. Such a policy, he contended, would be the most conducive to peace and the most economical. It ought to be retained and developed; but the army would be no proper agency for its execution. Military men and methods were