upon our national honor because of the treatment the
Indian has received.

General Sherman has told us that we have made more than one thousand
treaties with him, but the United States Government has never kept
one of these treaties, if there was anything to be made by breaking
it; and the Indian has never broken one, unless he has first had an
excuse in some cruel wrong from the white man. No wonder that the
Sioux have hesitated to sign their treaty. Do you not blush at one of
the reasons for this hesitation? Because they doubt whether we can be
trusted. This boasted American Republic is to them a nation of liars.

I am glad to speak for these men who have been, so cruelly wronged.
Here before we had any rights, they have been steadily driven back
before our civilization as it has advanced from the Atlantic and
Pacific shores. While our ears have ever been open to the cry of
distress the world over, the silent Indian moan has passed, too often
unheeded. We have made him a prisoner upon the reservation, and when
we have wanted his land we have taken it and put him on some we did
not want just then. His appeal, when in suffering and distress, has
been stifled by those who can make the most money out of him as he
is; and if hungry and in desperation he leaves his reservation, we
shoot him. We have put him in the control of an agent, whose
authority is as absolute as the Czar's. We have kept from him the
motive to be different and he has been literally a man without a
country and without a hope. Multitudes of people say, "Oh, yes, the
Indian has been wronged," but it makes very little impression upon
them. It is much the same feeling that the worldly man has who
acknowledges, in a general way, that he is a sinner, but it does not
touch him sufficiently to lead him to act. Will you bear with me in
giving some facts, with the hope that all may feel that this is not a
merely sentimental, indefinite sort of a subject for philanthropists
and "cranks," and a few women, but one in which each of us has some
personal responsibility. He is your brother and mine, in need, and we
owe him a duty. Some years ago Bishop Whipple went to Washington
pleading in vain for the Indians in Minnesota. After some days' delay
the Secretary of War said to a friend, "What does the Bishop want? If
he comes to tell us that our Indian system is a sink of iniquity,
tell him we all know it. Tell him also--and this is why I recall this
fact, more true th