its choice
will clearly be between two antagonistic schemes,--seclusion and
citizenship. Either the government must place the Indians upon narrower
reservations, proportioned to their requirements for subsistence by
agriculture, and no longer by the chase,--reservations which shall be
located with the view of avoiding as much as possible the contact of the
races, and working as little hindrance as may be to the otherwise free
development of population; and around these put up the barriers of forty
years ago, re-enforced as the changed circumstances seem to require: or
the government must prepare to receive the Indians into the body of the
people, freely accepting, for them and for the general community, all
the dangers and inconveniences of personal contact and legal equality.
No middle ground is tenable. If substantial seclusion is not to be
maintained, at any cost, by the sequestration of tribes and by the rigid
prohibition of intercourse, it is worse than useless to keep up the
forms of reservations and non-intercourse. Many tribes are already as
fully subject to all the debasing influences of contact with the whites
as they could be if dispersed among the body of citizens; while yet they
are without any of the advantages popularly attributed to citizenship.

It requires no deep knowledge of human nature, and no very extensive
review of Congressional legislation, to assure us that many and powerful
interests will oppose themselves to a re-adjustment of the Indian tribes
between the Missouri and the Pacific, under the policy of seclusion and
non-intercourse. Railroad enterprises, mining enterprises, and land
enterprises of every name, will find any scheme that shall be seriously
proposed to be quite the most objectionable of all that could be
offered: every State, and every Territory that aspires to become a
State, will strive to keep the Indians as far as possible from its own
borders; while powerful combinations of speculators will make their
fight for the last acre of Indian lands with just as much rapacity as if
they had not already, in Western phrase, "gobbled" a hundred thousand
square miles of it.

In addition to the political, industrial, and speculative interests
which will thus oppose the restoration of the policy of Indian seclusion
from the shattered condition to which the events just recited have
reduced it, three classes of persons may be counted on to lend their
support to the plan of introducing the I