THE RED MAN OF TO-DAY.

1029

tion, logical in theory, the illogical reverse works better in practice. The natural food of the Indians, the buffalo and wild game generally, has been destroyed by the white men. The red men themselves have been violently transplanted to reservations where they are virtually prisoners of war. Humanity cries out against starving a prisoner. Even experienced farmers would find it difficult to subsist in a wilderness, without food and tools for farming obtained from other sources, until they got "the farm started. How much more difficult for the proud and lazy warrior, whose fathers for countless generations never put their hands to a plow-handle, but spent their lives amid the excitements of the chase or the war-path. Besides, hungry Indians are dangerous. Starvation transforms the most peaceable man into a devil, mad with the wild insanity of hunger. So the government, it seems, ought to feed the Indians for the present, carefully keeping in view the end of their ultimate self-support.

It is a mere question of time until the white men overrun Indian Territory and the other reservations, as they have done all previous ones. Not less than a dozen railroads apply to the Interior Department and obtain rights of way through these reservations every year. First comes the army of track-builders, then stations spring up, with depot and telegraph agents, postmaster, express agent, and switchmen. These men have families. A store is opened. A blacksmith shop is built. From every passenger-train disembark explorers, sight-seers, speculators, emigrants. Almost in a night the line of the railway is strung with beads of thriving villages. All this is in violation of the treaty, which provided for railroad rights of way, but also provided that all white men should be excluded from the reservation.

If, without further discussion, we sum up what seem to us the most important changes to be made, we would say:

1. Avoid alike the extremist who cries aloud from the frontiers for the extermination of the Indian, and the extremist who lifts up his tearful voice in the quiet villages of the