white men will teach your children to read printing and to be like themselves.” The chief plainly avowed: “We do not want the white man; he steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.”
Mr. Sproat proceeds to argue that he had made a bona
fide purchase of the land from his own Government, and
again from the natives; that his occupation of it was
justifiable in nature and in morals; that the natives had only
partial and imperfect rights, as they did not occupy the
land in any civilized sense, and that the right of actual
colonization surpassed theirs and annulled it. He goes
further, and urges that Britain even had a right to conquer
a peopled and cultivated country like Oude, in India, as it
was a delinquent state and endangered neighboring English
territories. Sproat says that during the five years of his
residence the Indians deteriorated, and sickness and
mortality increased, — not from rum or syphilis, but that the
Indians seemed cowed, dispirited, discouraged, by the presence
of a superior race. Nobody harmed them; they had
more comforts; yet they decayed: savagism wasted them.
Nor have the British authorities, when it suited their ends to purchase land of the Indians, been any less covetous or any more generous in their business transactions than has our own Government. The Indians of Canada have, at different times, surrendered over sixteen millions of acres of land at prices from threepence down to less than a penny an acre. The treaty of 1850 surrendered to the Canadian Government a territory as large in area as Britain, — rich in minerals, fisheries, and forests, with less than three thousand Indians upon it, — for the sum paid down of $16,640 and a perpetual annuity of $4,400.
I have before me, as I write, two substantial volumes, bearing, respectively, the following titles: “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to the Secretary of the Interior, for the Year 1881,” Washington; and “Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of
