and of settled convictions respecting
this subject, among our people at large. So long as the country
fluctuates in an alternation of sentimental and brutal impulses,
according as the wrongs done to the Indian or the wrongs done by him are
at the moment more distinctly in mind, it cannot be wondered at that
Congress should be reluctant to undertake the re-organization of the
Indian service on any large and lasting plan, or that the Indian Office
should hesitate to cut out for itself more work than it can look to make
up in the interval between sessions.

What, to take a recent and memorable instance, would have been the fate
of any scheme of Indian legislation which was at its parliamentary
crisis when the murder of Gen. Canby occurred? The work of years might
well have been undone under the popular excitement attendant upon that
atrocious deed. Yet it would be quite as rational to denounce the
established systems for the care and control of the insane, and to turn
all the inmates of our asylums loose upon the community because one
maniac had in an access of frenzy murdered his keeper, as it would have
been to abandon the established Indian policy of the government, the
only fault of which is that it is incomplete, on account of any thing
that Capt. Jack and his companions might do in their furious despair.
The more atrocious their deed, the more conspicuous the justification of
the system of care and control from which this one small band of
desperadoes had for the moment broken free to work such horrid mischief.
Yet there is much reason to believe, that, had the Indian service at
that time depended, as every service must once a year come to depend, on
the votes of Congressmen, it would have failed, temporarily at least,
for the want of them. Nor is it only acts of exceptional ferocity on the
part of marauding bands, which have sufficed to check all the gracious
impulses of the national compassion. The reasons which have existed in
the public mind in favor of the Indian policy of the government have not
always been found of a sufficiently robust and practical nature to
withstand the weariness of sustained effort, and the inevitable
disappointments of sanguine expectation; and thus the service has at
times suffered from the general indifference scarcely less than from the
sharpest revulsions of public feeling.

Much has been said within the past three years, of the Indian policy of
the administration; and, if by this