d be too strong to
characterize the social homogeneity of an Indian tribe, and the complete
domination of the accepted ideas of right and wrong, of honor and
baseness. Public opinion is there conclusive upon every individual; and
the spectacle, seen in every town and village with us, of large numbers
openly practising that which public opinion reprobates, or refusing to
do that which public opinion prescribes, is wholly unknown. We do not
say that this is the most desirable as the ultimate form of society; but
this tyranny of sentiment may and should be made a most powerful
auxiliary for good in the early stages of industrial and social progress
for this people.

Second: it is unfortunately true, that, when the Indian is, by the
powerful attraction of a race which his savage breast never fails to
recognize as superior, released from the control of the public
sentiment which he has been accustomed to obey, he submits himself by
an almost irresistible tendency to the worst and not to the best
influences of civilized society. While there are undeniably exceptions
to this statement, it is supported by such a mass of melancholy evidence
in the history of scores of tribes once renowned for all the native
virtues, that no one has the right to advocate the introduction to such
influences of uninstructed and unprovided tribes, unless he is prepared
to contemplate the ruin of nine-tenths of the subjects of his policy.

Nor is it the worst elements of the Indian which thus submit themselves
to the worst elements of the white community. The very men who bear
themselves most loftily, according to the native standards of virtue,
are quite as likely to fall, under exposure to white contact, as are the
weakest of the tribe. Their familiar attractions all broken, their
immemorial traditions rudely dispelled, their natural leadership
destroyed, the members of a wild tribe, strong and weak together, become
the easy prey of the rascally influences of civilized society.

Third: the experiment of citizenship, except with the more advanced
tribes, is at the serious risk, amounting almost to a certainty, of the
immediate loss to the Indians of the whole of their scanty patrimony,
through the improvident and wasteful alienation of the lands patented to
them, the Indians being left thus without resource for the future,
except in the bounty of the general government or in local charity. On
this point a few facts will be more eloquent than many