Page:Visit of the Hon. Carl Schurz to Boston, March 1881.pdf/36

Rh it happens that even honest criticism, while trying to be just to one side, may become flagrantly unjust to the other.

As to my own administration of Indian Affairs, I am perfectly content to leave it to public judgment, even to the judgment of its critics, when the heat of unnecessary controversy shall have subsided. I know that my conduct has grown from just and humane purposes; that my naturally kind feelings for the Indians have, by direct intercourse with them, ripened into a personal friendship, and that that friendship is reciprocated by most of the Indians with whom I have had personal contact, and who sometimes express their feelings in delicate and tender manifestations of attachment and gratitude. For I may assure you that the Indian is by no means devoid of such impulses and feelings.

I think also that the policy followed by me during my administration,—the policy of promoting the transformation of the Indians from shiftless paupers into thrifty and orderly workers, as agriculturalists, herdsmen, traders, and mechanics; of extending their educational facilities, so as to teach them how to learn and how to live; of stimulating their desire to become individual owners of land, and of other property, like white men: a policy, in a word, of preparing them for their ultimate absorption into the great body of American citizenship, with all its rights and duties,—has been as successfully carried on as four years of hard and conscientious work in an ex-