t any time, without warning, and without any implied hostility
to those members of the tribe who remain on their reservation, and
deport themselves according to the conditions of the compact. The
brilliant campaign of Gen. Crook in Arizona during the past season has
been prosecuted with the most scrupulous observance of the reservation
system, as marked out by the government, and accepted by the Indians
themselves. Such a use of the military arm constitutes no abandonment of
the "peace policy," and involves no disparagement of it. Military
operations thus conducted are not in the nature of war, but of
discipline, and are so recognized by the tribes whose marauding bands
and parties are scourged back to the reservations by the troops. The
effect of all this is something more than negative. It does not merely
serve to chastise offending individuals and parties without a breach of
peace with the tribe; but it is made the means of impressing the less
enterprising Indians with an increasing sense of the power of the
government. It was not to be expected that the entire body of a warlike
tribe would consent to be restrained in their Ishmaelitish proclivities
without a struggle on the part of the more audacious to maintain their
traditional freedom. The reservation system allows this issue to be
fought out between our troops and the more daring of the savages,
without involving in the contest tribes with which our army in its
present numbers is wholly inadequate to cope.

Nor will the full effect of this consideration be appreciated if it be
not borne in mind that the Indian is intensely susceptible to severe
punishment. His own wars are so bloodless, his skirmishing tactics so
cowardly and resultless, that the savage fighting of the whites, their
eagerness for close quarters, and their deadly earnestness when engaged
hand to hand, impress him with a strange terror. With him, as with all
persons and peoples in whom the imagination is predominant, the effect
of disaster is not measured by the actual loss and suffering entailed,
but by the source, the shape, the suddenness, of it. Indeed, it is
astonishing how completely the spirit of an Indian tribe may be broken
by a catastrophe which does not necessarily impair its fighting power.

Nor even is it necessary that the Indian's sense of justice should be
met by the chastisement received. Undiscriminating in his own revenge,
he does not look for nicely measured retribution on the