is meant that the policy of the
government in dealing with the Indians has become more and more one of
administration, and less and less one of law, the phrase, with the
exception of an article too many, is well enough. As matter of fact, the
sole Indian policy of the United States deserving the name was adopted
early in the century; and it is only of late years that it has been
seriously undermined by the current of events; while it is within the
duration of the present administration that the blow has been struck by
legislation, at the already tottering structure, which has brought it
nearly to its fall.

To throw upon a dozen religious and benevolent societies the
responsibility of advising the executive in the appointment of the
agents of the Indian service is not a policy. To buy off a few bands,
more insolent than the rest, by a wholesale issue of subsistence and the
lavish bestowal of presents, without reference to the disposition of the
savages to labor for their own support, and even without reference to
the good or ill desert of individuals,--this, though doubtless expedient
in the critical situation of our frontier population, is the merest
expediency, not in any sense a policy. Yet the two features specified
have been the only ones that have been added to the scheme of Indian
control during the continuance of the present administration; while, on
the other side, an irreparable breach has been effected in that scheme
by the action of powerful social forces, as well as by the direct
legislative contravention of its most vital principle.

From the earliest settlement of the country by the whites, down to 1817,
the Colonies, and afterwards the thirteen States, met the emergencies of
Indian contact as they arose. The parties to negotiation were often
ill-defined, and the forms of procedure much as happened. Not only did
each Colony, prior to 1774, conduct its own Indian relations, generally
with little or no reference to the engagements or the interests of its
white neighbors; but isolated settlements and even enterprising
individuals made their own peace with the savages, or received the soil
by deed from its native proprietors. Nor on the part of the Indians was
there much more regard for strict legitimacy. Local chieftains were not
infrequently ready to convey away lands that did not belong to them; and
when a Colony grown powerful wished a pretext for usurpation, almost any
Indian would do to make a treaty w