ers few or none.

2. The self-government enjoyed by the Indian tribes under the
Constitution of the United States, as under the European powers, has
always been a government by sufferance, by toleration, by permission.
The United States, for their own convenience, have allowed this
self-government, because to reduce the savages to the condition of
submitting to civilized laws would have involved a great expense of
blood and treasure; while through the tribal organization a much better
government, for the purposes of the civilized power if not for the
welfare of the Indians themselves, could be obtained, than through an
administration which should disregard that organization. But this
toleration of savage self-government worked no prejudice to the
sovereignty of the United States.

3. The decay of a tribe in numbers and in cohesion, no matter to what
extent carried, does not bring the members of such tribe within the
municipal jurisdiction of the State wherein they are found, so long as
the tribal organization continues to be recognized by the National
Government. See the Kansas Indians, 5 Wallace, 737.

4. Congress is constitutionally competent to extend the laws of the
United States at once over every Indian tribe within the Territories, if
not within the States of the Union, even though treaties may guarantee
to individual tribes complete and perpetual political independence; the
breach of faith involved in the latter case being matter for possible
conscientious scruples on the part of legislators, not for judicial
cognizance. See 11 Wallace, 616; 2 Curtis, 454; 1 Woolworth, 155.

We have thought it important thus to review the doctrine of the Report
of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because, from the high standing of
the Committee, from the assumption which the Report[P] makes of
completeness in the citation of "treaties, laws, and judicial
decisions" pertinent to the subject, on the express ground of a desire
to enlighten, not only Congress, but the country, in respect to our
Indian relations, and from the wide circulation given to the Report, as
compared with that obtained by an ordinary decision of the Circuit or
Supreme Court of the United States, the Report has apparently come to be
accepted by Congress and the country as an authoritative exposition of
the history and law of the subject although, in the very month in which
it was submitted to Congress, the Supreme Court, in the Cherokee
Tobacco, pronounced