In connection with the Indians, by the way, it was again and again necessary to assert the position of the President as steward of the whole people.  I had a capital Indian Commissioner, Francis E. Leupp.  I found that I could rely on his judgment not to get me into fights that were unnecessary, and therefore I always backed him to the limit when he told me that a fight was necessary.  On one occasion, for example, Congress passed a bill to sell to settlers about half a million acres of Indian land in Oklahoma at one and a half dollars an acre.  I refused to sign it, and turned the matter over to Leupp.  The bill was accordingly withdrawn, amended so as to safeguard the welfare of the Indians, and the minimum price raised to five dollars an acre.  Then I signed the bill.  We sold that land under sealed bids, and realized for the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indians more than four million dollars—­three millions and a quarter more than they would have obtained if I had signed the bill in its original form.  In another case, where there had been a division among the Sac and Fox Indians, part of the tribe removing to Iowa, the Iowa delegation in Congress, backed by two Iowans who were members of my Cabinet, passed a bill awarding a sum of nearly a half million dollars to the Iowa seceders.  They had not consulted the Indian Bureau.  Leupp protested against the bill, and I vetoed it.  A subsequent bill was passed on the lines laid down by the Indian Bureau, referring the whole controversy to the courts, and the Supreme Court in the end justified our position by deciding against the Iowa seceders and awarding the money to the Oklahoma stay-at-homes.

As to all action of this kind there have long been two schools of political thought, upheld with equal sincerity.  The division has not normally been along political, but temperamental, lines.  The course I followed, of regarding the executive as subject only to the people, and, under the Constitution, bound to serve the people affirmatively in cases where the Constitution does not explicitly forbid him to render the service, was substantially the course followed by both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.  Other honorable and well-meaning Presidents, such as James Buchanan, took the opposite and, as it seems to me, narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than of the people, and can do nothing, no matter how necessary it be to act, unless the Constitution explicitly commands the action.  Most able lawyers who are past middle age take this view, and so do large numbers of well-meaning, respectable citizens.  My successor in office took this, the Buchanan, view of the President’s powers and duties.