criterion of the amount that should be paid for it. On a full consideration of the whole matter, it is the opinion of this office that from two to two and a half cents an acre would be an ample equivalent for it.” Some discretion is left to the commissioners as to giving more than this if the Indians are “not satisfied;” but any such increase of price must be “based on such evidence and information as shall fully satisfy the President and Senate.”[1]
Reading farther on in these instructions, we come at last to the real secret of this apparent niggardliness on the part of the Government. It is not selfishness at all; it is the purest of philanthropy. The Government has all along been suffering in mind from two conflicting desires—“the desire to give these Indians an equivalent for their possessions,” and, on the other hand, “the well-ascertained fact that no greater curse can be inflicted on a tribe so little civilized as the Sioux than to have large sums of money coming to them as annuities,” * * * On the whole, the commissioner says that we are called on, “as a matter of humanity and duty toward this helpless race, to make every exertion in our power not to place much money at their discretion.” The Government is beginning very well in this direction, it must be admitted, when it proposes to pay for Mississippi Valley lands in Minnesota only two and a half cents per acre. “Humanity and duty” allied could hardly do more at one stroke than that.
We cannot ascribe to the same philanthropy, however, the withholding from 1887 to 1850 the $3000 a year which the treaty of 1837 provided should be expended “annually” as the President might direct, and which was not expended at all, because President after President directed that it should be ap-
- ↑ “Chrysostom was of opinion, and not without reason, that, in contracts, as often as we strive earnestly to buy anything for less than it is worth, or to have more than our just measure or weight, there was in that fact a kind of theft.”—Grotius on Contracts.
