Page:Visit of the Hon. Carl Schurz to Boston, March 1881.pdf/60

Rh white man's credentials for title and possession; and not till the Indian copies them and holds by them will he be treated otherwise than as the vermin of the soil.

While we find cause of satisfaction and encouragement in the adoption of an Indian policy for the future which will rectify our errors and wrongs, we must not imagine that we are thus to relieve a most serious and perplexing duty of its difficulties and embarrassments. The Indian question will be a troublesome one to our Government and people so long as there are Indians. And there will be special race characteristics about it, in many respects unlike those which invest a wise dealing with the blacks and the Chinese. Some of us have charitably tried to interpret the remark attributed to our great General, that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” as simply meaning that the Indian element or quality must be suppressed, overruled, or killed out of a man, before he will be a safe or promising subject to deal with. If this be a fair construction of the stern sentence, it will find multitudes to accord with it. We need only to remind ourselves what dreads and disgusts are stirred up by the presence and prowling of a tramp around our best-guarded rural homesteads, to conceive what apprehensions will threaten the inhabitants of frontiers on the border lines of civilization and savagery, in the neighborhood of Indians, even while they are advancing in the early stages of fixed residences and farming.