oath was taken that it should be respected: but
before long it was invaded like the rest. Mr. Bell, in his Report of the
Committee on Indian Affairs, February 24, 1830, has these words:--"To
pay an Indian tribe what their ancient hunting-grounds are worth to
them, after the game is fled or destroyed, as a mode of appropriating
wild lands claimed by Indians, has been found more convenient, and
certainly it is more agreeable to the forms of justice, as well as more
merciful, than to assert the possession of them by the sword. Thus the
practice of buying Indian titles is but the substitute which humanity
and expediency have imposed, in place of the sword, in arriving at the
actual enjoyment of property claimed by the right of discovery, and
sanctioned by the natural superiority allowed to the claims of civilized
communities over those of savage tribes. Up to the present time
so invariable has been the operation of certain causes, first in
diminishing the value of forest lands to the Indians, and secondly in
disposing them to sell readily, that the plan of buying their right of
occupancy has never threatened to retard, in any perceptible degree, the
prosperity of any of the States." (Legislative Documents, 21st Congress,
No. 227, p. 6.)]

Chapter XVIII: Future Condition Of Three Races--Part II

These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to
be irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of North America are
doomed to perish; and that whenever the Europeans shall be established
on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will be no more.
*i The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or civilization;
in other words, they must either have destroyed the Europeans or become
their equals.

[Footnote i: This seems, indeed, to be the opinion of almost all
American statesmen. "Judging of the future by the past," says Mr.
Cass, "we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their
numbers, and their eventual extinction, unless our border should become
stationary, and they be removed beyond it, or unless some radical change
should take place in the principles of our intercourse with them, which
it is easier to hope for than to expect."]

At the first settlement of the colonies they might have found it
possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the small
bodies of strangers who landed on their continent. *j They several
times attempted to do it, and were