The question now asks itself:  “Why were not these hopeful missionary efforts to these pagan tribes more permanent?  What turned the tide of success and left the missions stranded?” Here comes the story of dishonor.  The Indian was here when the white man came.  The Christian white men recognized the Indian’s right of occupancy as a right.  They did not hold that half a million savages had a right to dispute the ultimate sovereignty of civilization, but they agreed that when civilization should move forward and barbarism should retreat, the Indian should have Christian justice and not un-Christian wrong.  He should not be oppressed.  He should be treated equitably.  His rights should be acknowledged, and if the demands of the greater number and the greater life asked for a surrender of his rights as original occupant, then there should be fair consideration, compensation and honesty.  It may be the providence of God that barbarism shall be 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