I am glad to speak for these men who have been, so cruelly wronged.  Here before we had any rights, they have been steadily driven back before our civilization as it has advanced from the Atlantic and Pacific shores.  While our ears have ever been open to the cry of distress the world over, the silent Indian moan has passed, too often unheeded.  We have made him a prisoner upon the reservation, and when we have wanted his land we have taken it and put him on some we did not want just then.  His appeal, when in suffering and distress, has been stifled by those who can make the most money out of him as he is; and if hungry and in desperation he leaves his reservation, we shoot him.  We have put him in the control of an agent, whose authority is as absolute as the Czar’s.  We have kept from him the motive to be different and he has been literally a man without a country and without a hope.  Multitudes of people say, “Oh, yes, the Indian has been wronged,” but it makes very little impression upon them.  It is much the same feeling that the worldly man has who acknowledges, in a general way, that he is a sinner, but it does not touch him sufficiently to lead him to act.  Will you bear with me in giving some facts, with the hope that all may feel that this is not a merely sentimental, indefinite sort of a subject for philanthropists and “cranks,” and a few women, but one in which each of us has some personal responsibility.  He is your brother and mine, in need, and we owe him a duty.  Some years ago Bishop Whipple went to Washington pleading in vain for the Indians in Minnesota.  After some days’ delay the Secretary of War said to a friend, “What does the Bishop want?  If he comes to tell us that our Indian system is a sink of iniquity, tell him we all know it.  Tell him also—­and this is why I recall this fact, more true than when it was first spoken—­tell him also that the United States never cures a wrong until the people demand it; and when the hearts of the people are reached the Indian will be saved.”  Then let us try to arouse the people to demand it.

And I beg you to notice, that the wrongs are not of the past, but of the present.  Those who say otherwise have either not examined the facts or else they are deceived.  While there has been much progress made since General Grant’s administration, the machinery of our Indian affairs in its last analysis seems to be largely yet a scheme to plunder the Indian at every point.  Its mechanism is so complicated that there are comparatively few who understand the wrong, and these seem almost powerless.  While there are many men in the Government employ of the best intentions, there is always a “wicked partner” who contrives, somehow, to rob the Indian.