made with him, and broke. We drew circles round his freedom, smaller and
smaller. We allowed him such and such territory, then took it away and
gave him less and worse in exchange. Throughout a century our promises to
him were a whole basket of scraps of paper. The other day I saw some
Indians in California. It had once been their place. All over that region
they had hunted and fished and lived according to their desires, enjoying
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We came. To-day the hunting
and fishing are restricted by our laws--not the Indian's--because we
wasted and almost exterminated in a very short while what had amply
provided the Indian with sport and food for a very long while.

In that region we have taken, as usual, the fertile land and the running
water, and have allotted land to the Indian where neither wood nor water
exist, no crops will grow, no human life can be supported. I have seen
the land. I have seen the Indian begging at the back door. Oh, yes, they
were an "inferior race." Oh, yes, they didn't and couldn't use the land
to the best advantage, couldn't build Broadway and the Union Pacific
Railroad, couldn't improve real estate. If you choose to call the whole
thing "manifest destiny," I am with you. I'll not dispute that what we
have made this continent is of greater service to mankind than the
wilderness of the Indian ever could possibly have been--once conceding,
as you have to concede, the inevitableness of civilization. Neither you,
nor I, nor any man, can remold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we
could have behaved better to the Indian. That was in our power. And we
gave him a raw deal instead, not once, but again and again. We did it
because we could do it without risk, because he was weaker and we could
always beat him in the end. And all the while we were doing it, there was
our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, founded on a new
thing in the world, proclaiming to mankind the fairest hope yet born,
that "All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable