been overridden by circumstances unforeseen, but resisting, by obstacles, complications, incidental and temporary contingencies, defying even, the power as well as the deliberate intentions of the Government. There have been three principal and obstinate agencies of this mischief which have started up, unforeseen and unprovided for, and before which the Government has yielded.
1. We must recognize that spring and source of so much of our national trouble,—the conflict between the Federal and State jurisdictions, by which, as in the first signal case of Georgia, paralleled ever since down to our own times, the Government pledged to Indians territory which afterward came under the sway of local Legislatures.
2. The rapid opening and occupation of vast regions for improvement by the whites, so that in decades of years the frontier lines have encroached on Indian domains,—the lines changing like an horizon, while the settlements of the Pacific coast have griped the central wilderness, tightening its borders and reducing its extent.
3. The enterprises of exploration, of mail routes, of telegraphs, and mining by the people, who are stronger than the Government; before whom the Government has quailed, temporized, and then broken its solemn pledges.
Nor in this century of public faithlessness and inhumanity, of oppression and cruelty, have our people been merely the inflictors of wrong. Suffer-
