crowded out by civilization, that the Indian's hunting-ground shall
yield to the railway and the marts of commerce. It may not be right
that a continent of eight millions of square miles, more than twice
the size of all Europe, fair and beautiful and rich in resources,
should be kept for game preserves for half a million savages. It is
right that the forest should fall to make room for New England
villages, with their churches and school-houses and industry. The
rude stage of existence must make way for a higher. But the higher
has no right to be wicked in its onward movement. It has no right to
rob or cheat. It has no right to make compacts and violate them. It
has no right to break its faith with the weak. It has no right to
outrage the principle of justice.

The history of Indian wrongs by the whites in the inevitable advances
of civilization, need not be recited here. Unscrupulous greed has
hovered about the Indian reservations as waiting buzzards hover near
the wounded creature upon whose flesh they would fatten. Lands
guaranteed to the Indians were encroached upon by white people. These
encroachments resisted led to wars. Savage nature, wrought up with a
sense of injustice and burning for revenge, swept down upon guilty
intruders and innocent settlers alike, with indiscriminate massacre.
Then the Government called out its soldiery, and Indian wars with
less than half a million savages have cost the United States
$500,000,000, enough to plant missions among all the heathen tribes
of the world.

Frontiersmen who have coveted the Indian reservations, when they
already had more land than they could use, without the possessions
which they desired to secure, have satisfied themselves that a
degraded race of savages had no rights which they were bound to
respect; and how could the missionaries prosper, when the ignorant
saw such exhibitions of character and life on the part of the people
from whom the missionaries came? These wars have led to cancellation
of treaties, because of inhuman violence, and then, the reservation
taken up, the savage is removed still further back. Thus the Indians
have been planted and uptorn, re-planted and uptorn, and re-planted,
until they are now removed, not hundreds of miles from the grounds of
their fathers, but thousands of miles. A tree will not grow if
uprooted and transplanted every few months, and this will in brief
tell us why the missions which began with the Moravians and the