The associations which bind the Indians to the land of their forefathers are strong and enduring; and these must be broken by their emigration.  But they are also broken by our citizens, who every day encounter all the difficulties of similar changes in pursuit of the means of support.  And the experiments that have been made satisfactorily show that, by proper precautions and liberal appropriations, the removal and establishment of the Indians can be effected with little comparative trouble to them, or us....  If they remain, they must decline, and eventually disappear.  Such is the result of all experience.  If they remove, they may be comfortably established, and their moral and physical condition ameliorated....

The great moral debt we owe to this unhappy race is universally felt and acknowledged.  Diversities of opinion exist respecting the proper mode of discharging this obligation, but its validity is not denied.

Indolent in his habits, the Indian is opposed to labor; improvident in his mode of life, he has little foresight in providing, or care in preserving.  Taught from infancy to reverence his own traditions and institutions, he is satisfied of their value, and dreads the anger of the Great Spirit, if he should depart from the customs of his fathers.  Devoted to the use of ardent spirits, he abandons himself to its indulgence without restraint.  War and hunting are his only occupations....  Shall they be advised to remain, or remove?  If the former, their fate is written in the annals of their race; if the latter, we may yet hope to see them renovated in character and condition, by our example and instruction, and their exertions.

[Footnote 23:  A native of New Hampshire, but for many years a citizen of Michigan:  conspicuous in public life, and a writer of high authority on Indian and military affairs, and the settlement of the north-west.]

* * * * *

=_Rufus Choate, 1799-1859._= (Manual, p. 487.)

From his “Lectures and Addresses.”

=_92._= CONSERVATIVE FORCE OF THE AMERICAN BAR.

Is it not so that in its nature, in its functions, in the intellectual and practical habits which it forms, in the opinions to which it conducts, in all its tendencies and influences of speculation and action, it is, and ought to be, professionally and peculiarly such an element and such an agent, that it contributes, or ought to be held to contribute, more than all things else, or as much as anything else, to preserve our organic forms, our civil and social order, our public and private justice, our constitutions of government, even the Union itself?  In these crises through which our liberty is to pass, may not, must not, this function of conservatism become more and more developed, and more and more operative?  May it not one day be written, for the praise of the American Bar, that it helped to keep the true idea of the state alive and germinant in the American mind; that it helped