Cleveland said that he did not intend, when he signed this bill, to apply it to more than one reservation at first, and so on, which I thought was very wise. But you see he has been led to apply it to half a dozen. The bill provides for capitalizing the remainder of the land for the benefit of the Indian, but the greed of the land-grabber is such as to press the application of this bill to the utmost. There is no danger but this will come most rapidly, — too rapidly, I think. The greed and hunger and thirst of the white man for the Indian's land are almost equal to his hunger and thirst for righteousness.' That is going to be the difficulty in the application of this bill. He is going to press it forward too fast." And the Senator added this advice: "Say that no Indian shall be put upon a homestead, under this act, until he realizes what is meant by it, and until he has such material round about him as will enable him to maintain himself there, and then let him work out his own destiny." That was wisely said.

In order to guard against this danger, there ought to be an amendment to the Severalty Law, requiring for many years to come the sort of evidence of fitness which has heretofore been demanded in several cases of allotments authorized by treaty or special law, as in that of certain Wisconsin Indians in 1865, and certain Kansas Indians in 1873. In the last-named case the provision was this: "If any adult member of said tribe shall desire to become a citizen of the United States, shall prove by at least two competent witnesses, to the satisfaction of the Circuit Court of the United States for the State of Kansas, that he or she is sufficiently intelligent and prudent to manage his or her own affairs, and has for the period of five years been able to maintain himself or herself and family, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, and shall take an oath of allegiance to the United States, as provided by law for the naturalization

of aliens, he or she shall be declared by said court to be a citizen of the United States, which shall be entered of record, and a certificate thereof given to said party." This sort of provision, in the case of an adult, is a reasonable and fit one. Without it there is no sufficient assurance that the Indians will not be crowded out into the world much too fast. I notice that our excellent Indian commissioner, General Morgan, who will remain in his present office, I trust, until he is promoted to a higher one, expresses the very sensible opinion, in his last report, that the surplus land ought not to be negotiated for until the allotments are all made. Now consider what the pressure to get hold of these lands is going to be. "The greed of the land-grabber," like a strong mainspring, will be forever operating to secure the surplus land. If, as seems wise, the allotments must first be made, then it will be forever operating to secure allotments; and if, as the law is now interpreted, the Indians cannot have their allotments and patents without being thereby made citizens and subject to state and territorial law, the pressure of this dangerous and constant mainspring will be transferred to that point, and will be felt in a most serious way in hurrying them out from under the protection of the general government long before they should go. Consider what the condition of a vast proportion of them still is. "I wish," said the agent at the Santee Agency in Nebraska, in his report to the commissioner in August last, "to impress upon the department that these Indians are yet as overgrown children. But very few of the adults are able to speak English, and during this generation will need more or less encouragement and training." Remember the Messiah craze, and the state of advancement in civilization that it indicated. An agent on the Sac and Fox Reservation in Iowa reported to the commissioner last August: "I have lived near these people twenty years, and I

be nearly sixty years. Suppose it to be half that time, this is quite too long to allow us to yield to the arguments of those who say: "Let the matter alone; it is a vanishing state of things; all will have passed away before you can mend matters." During this process of " vanishing," such bloody fruits of our present system are showing themselves, and will continue to show themselves, as the dreadful outbreak and slaughter of last winter. How soon we can mend matters depends on ourselves and our representatives at Washington. Matters can be mended at the next session of Congress if the people sternly demand it.

What then shall we do? (1.) We must not leave things alone for one or two generations, to be worked out by the Severalty Law unaided. We cannot do that. See what General Morgan says of the existing system, in his last report: "The entire system of dealing with them [the Indians] is vicious, involving as it does the installing of agents with semidespotic power over ignorant, superstitious, and helpless subjects; the keeping of thousands of them on reservations practically as prisoners, isolated from civilized life, and dominated by fear and force; the issue of rations and annuities, which inevitably tends to breed pauperism; the disbursement of millions of dollars' worth of supplies by contract, which invites fraud; the maintenance of a system of licensed trade, which stimulates cupidity and extortion."

If it be thought that a wise and steady administration of the present system will answer well enough, I reply that we cannot have, under such a government as ours, a steady, firm, uniform administration of the merely political sort, in the case of so complicated a matter as our Indian affairs. Good administration is the weak point in our form of government; for the proof of that it is enough to appeal to the record of a hundred years. We may mend and patch, but the result will be bad oftener than good.

(2.) If it be said, "Very well, let us hurry through the allotments; let us do as was done with the slaves after the war, remove all civil disabilities at once and set up the Indians forthwith as citizens," I have already dealt with that sort of suggestion. But let me say a word or two more. This is, indeed, the kind of short cut which suits a democratic people when it is once aroused to the necessity of having a change; then the tendency is to go straight to the mark. One reason for this is the instinctive apprehension, in such a community, of its own weakness in administering any complicated system or adhering long and steadily to a purpose. The slow method (it says to itself), the method of gradual approach, is not safe. Accordingly, we all know that this sort of swift dispatch has been urged. It is the way which preoccupied and impatient minds are apt to recommend; and some others also. It was the one preferred by that excellent soldier and friend of the Indians, General Crook. Undoubtedly it has its advantages. To give the Indians the ballot at once would do for them what was done for the slaves; it would put into their hands a weapon which would powerfully help them in working out their political salvation among their neighbors. Whatever temporary disturbances may take place, the ultimate result is certain, that he who has the ballot is one who will be protected from abuse.

Such was General Crook's reasoning about it.

But this course, as I have said, has insuperable objections. The great body of the tribal Indians are totally unfit for the ballot, and it would be inexcusable to force such a body of voters suddenly upon the States where they live. It was bad enough, although politically necessary, to do this sort of thing at the end of the war, in communities which had revolted, staked all upon war, and lost. It would be inexcusable to do it in the midst of a loyal population, who are

entitled to have their wishes consulted by the government. And above all, it would be an abandonment by the government of its highest present duty to the red men, that of governing and sheltering them. In view of what has happened at the South with the negroes, and of the well-known local hostility to the Indians at the West, it cannot be doubted that they would suffer much. Remember that with the giving of full citizenship there would take place a loss of all power in the federal government to legislate specially for them. Nothing is clearer than that they need, and will need for a good while, the very careful and exceptional protection of the nation. The power to give this special and exceptional protection exists now, growing out of the strange political situation which I have expounded; and it is the one best thing there is about the present state of things. We must seize upon this and use it.

(3.) How shall we use it? That is the question that still recurs. We use our power now in dealing with the Indians by this vile process which pretends to leave them to govern themselves, and yet, in its actual application, denies them liberty and shuts them up on reservations; pauperizes them; insults and breaks down all of law, custom, and religion that they have inherited from their fathers and have been taught to venerate; excludes civilization, trade, law; and subjects them to the unsteady tyranny of the politicians. This way of using our power should be at once abandoned. But there is a wise way to use it, and I am glad to say that while Congress has lagged the Indian commissioners have made, since 1882, a slight but useful beginning in the right direction. Upon some agencies the agent is directed to appoint Indians to hear and judge the complaints of their fellows against one another, subject to the revision of the agent himself, and ultimately of the commissioner. The testimony is uniform,

I think, as to the salutary and steadying effect of these "courts." Of course they are not courts in our ordinary sense, for they do not administer law, but merely certain rules of the Indian Department. They bear about the same relation to courts, in the proper sense of the term, that courts - martial do; they are really a branch of the executive department. But their effect in educating the Indians and assisting the department in its heavy burden of government has been such as to point clearly to the wisdom of following up this good beginning (the suggestion of Commissioner Hiram Price, I believe) and giving the Indians real courts and real law. This is what we must do, extend law and courts of justice to the reservations.

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A simple thing, indeed, is it not? Does this seem to my reader, I wonder, as it does to me, obviously just, obviously wise, obviously expedient? Yet our legislators at Washington let it linger year after year, and we cannot get it done. We must demand of them that they no longer neglect it,that they abandon any attitude of obstruction upon this subject, any mistaken fancy that the Severalty Law has actually done all that has been made possible by it. I express the conviction not merely of one person, but of a vast number of the friends of the Indians, in declaring that the one most pressing and vital necessity to-day, in this matter, is that of bringing the Indians and all their affairs under the steady operation of law and courts. This is saying no new thing. Many of us who had the honor of advocating the Severalty Law before it was passed always coupled it with the demand for extending law to the Indians. This necessity has long been obvious; indeed, it sickens one to look back and see how uniform and how pressing has been the cry for this, during many years, as the thing most needful.

Let me repeat some of these utter-
Nearly twenty years ago, in

ances.

1873, the Indian commissioner urged this matter in his report, and again, in 1874, pressed it, with careful specific recommendations for establishing a system of law among the Indians. In 1876 the Indian commissioner (J. Q. Smith) said in his annual report: "My predecessors have frequently called attention to the startling fact that we have within our midst 275,000 people, the least intelligent portion of our population, for whom we provide no law, either for their protection or for the punishment of crime committed among themselves. . . . Our Indians are remitted by a great civilized government to the control, if control it can be called, of the rude regulations of petty ignorant tribes. Year after year we expend millions of dollars for these people, in the faint hope that, without law, we can civilize them. That hope has been to a great degree a long disappointment, and year after year we repeat the folly of the past. That the benevolent efforts and purposes of the government have proved so largely fruitless is, in my judgment, due more to its failure to make these people amenable to our laws than to any other cause, or to all other causes combined. I believe it to be the duty of Congress at once to extend over Indian reservations the jurisdiction of United States courts, and to declare that each Indian in the United States shall occupy the same relation to law that a white man does. . . . I regard this suggestion as by far the most important which I have to make in this report."

In 1877 the wise and devoted Bishop Hare said, in a passage which was quoted at length by the Indian commissioner in his report of 1883 with renewed recommendations: "Civilization has loosened, in some places broken, the bonds which regulate and hold together Indian society in its wild state, and has failed to give the people law and officers of justice in their place. This evil still continues unabated.

Women are

brutally beaten and outraged; men are murdered in cold blood; the Indians who are friendly to schools and churches are intimidated and preyed upon by the evil-disposed; children are molested on their way to school, and schools are dispersed by bands of vagabonds: but there is no redress. This accursed condition of things is an outrage upon the one Lawgiver. It is a disgrace to our land. It should make every man who sits in the national halls of legislation blush. And, wish well to the Indians as we may, and do for them what we will, the efforts of civil agents, teachers, and missionaries are like the struggles of drowning men weighted with lead as long as, by the absence of law, Indian society is left without a base." In that same year (1877) Indian agents declared over and over again that a system of law on the reservations was the great need. "By far the greatest need of this agency," said one of them, “is civil law. Give us civil law and power to execute it." In 1878 the Indian commissioner in his report quoted Joseph, the famous and very able Nez Percé chief, as saying that "the greatest want of the Indians is a system of law by which controversies between Indians and between Indians and white men can be settled without appealing to physical force. . . . Indians . . . understand the operation of laws, and if there were any statutes the Indians would be perfectly content to place themselves in the hands of a proper tribunal, and would not take the righting of their wrongs into their own hands or retaliate, as they now do, without the law."

How many of my readers have ever read that wonderful, most moving story of this same Chief Joseph, sent by Bishop Hare to the North American Review, and published there in April, 1879? In introducing it the bishop expressed his own appreciation of it by saying, "I wish that I had words at command in which to express adequately the interest