she loses anything you write. Please tell your business manager to put my name on his list for the tri-weekly, or semi-weekly, or whatever edition will contain your editorials, and send me the bill.
We are busy and happy—time passes swiftly and agreeably—getting ready to live in our country home.
All sorts of non-paying public trusts of local significance, merely, are piling up on my hands. I look out of the loopholes, and see what I do see! and am content.
PRESENT ASPECTS OF THE INDIAN PROBLEM[1]
That the history of our Indian relations presents, in great part, a record of broken treaties, of unjust wars and of cruel spoliation, is a fact too well known to require proof or to suffer denial. But it is only just to the Government of the United States to say that its treaties with Indian tribes were, as a rule, made in good faith, and that most of our Indian wars were brought on by circumstances for which the Government itself could not fairly be held responsible. Of the treaties, those were the most important by which the Government guaranteed to Indian tribes certain tracts of land as reservations to be held and occupied by them forever under the protection of the United States, in the place of other lands ceded by the Indians. There is no reason to doubt that in most, if not all, of such cases, those who conducted Indian affairs on the part of the Government, not anticipating the rapid advance of settlement, sincerely believed in the possibility of maintaining those reservations intact for the Indians, and that, in this respect, while their intentions were honest, their foresight was at fault. There are men still living who spent their younger days near the borders of “Indian country” in Ohio and Indiana, and it is a well-
- ↑ North American Review, July, 1881.
