INTRODUCTION.
The present number of Indians in the United States does not
exceed three hundred thousand, but is possibly as large now as
when the Europeans began the settlement of the North American
continent. Different tribes then existing have dwindled, and
some have become extinct; but there is reason to believe that the
vast territory now occupied by the United States, if not then a
howling wilderness, was largely an unpeopled solitude. The
roaming wild men who met the new discoverers were, however,
numerous enough to make the Indian problem at the outset a
serious one, while neither its gravity nor its difficulty yet shows
signs of diminution.
The difficulty is not because the Indians are wild and savage men, for such men have in the past history of the human race been subdued and civilized in unnumbered instances, while the changes which in our time have been wrought among the cannibals of the South Sea and the barbarians of South Africa, and among the wildest and most savage of the North American Indians themselves, show abundantly that the agencies of civilization ready to our hand are neither wanting nor weak.
The great difficulty with the Indian problem is not with the Indian, but with the Government and people of the United States. Instead of a liberal and far-sighted policy looking to the education and civilization and possible citizenship of the Indian tribes, we have suffered these people to remain as savages, for whose future we have had no adequate care, and to the consideration of whose present state the Government has only been moved when pressed by some present danger. We have encroached upon their means of subsistence without furnishing them any proper return; we have shut them up on reservations often notoriously unfit for them, or, if fit, we have not hesitated to drive them off for
