eys, and plains, with
seats, mills, and various institutions belonging to our system.[85]

[Footnote 85: This was proved by the result. The work was published in
Oct., 1838, and was a very creditable performance, but the author had
been two or three or even four years about it, and the information was
just this time out of date.]

_19th_. A memorial is got up in Ionia County, on Grand River, respecting
the Indians, their feelings and their affairs. In it facts are
distorted, opinions misapprehended, and the acts and policy of the
government and its agents greatly misconceived in some things, and
wholly misrepresented in others. And the paper, when examined by the
lights of treaties and acts, as they really occurred, is to be regarded
as the work of some ambitious man who wishes to get on the backs of the
Indians to ride into office, or to promote, in some other way, selfish
and concealed ends. All such attempts, though they may seem to "run
well" for a time, and may result in temporary success, may be safely
left to the counteraction of right opinions. For it has always remained
an axiom of truth, verified by every day's experience, "That he that
diggeth a pit for his neighbor shall himself fall into it."

_20th_. General Jo. M. Brown, of the militia, who with the valor of the
redoubtable Peter Stuyvesant at Christina, marched into Toledo,
"brimful of wrath and cabbage," transmits the above precious memorial,
not to the Department, or the President, to whom it is ostensibly
addressed, but to the editor of a political party paper at Detroit, to
"manufacture" public opinion, claiming, at the same time, very high
motives for so very disinterested an act, in which the good of the
Indians, and the integrity of public faith, are clearly held forth as
the aim of the writer. The editor endorsing it with most high-sounding
phrases, in which he speaks of it as taking fit place beside the most
atrocious fictions, which have been conjured up by mistaken heads and
zealous hearts, anxious to ride the aforesaid "Indian question," in
relation to the Cherokees and Florida Indians. When all this
grandiloquent display of parental sympathy, and a sense of outraged
justice, is stripped of its false garbs and put into the crucible of
truth, the result is, that political capital can be made just now of the
handling of the topic. A delay of a few months (owing to the fiscal
crisis at Washington) in the payment of half the annuity for the yea