which forms peculiar types of character, breeds remarkable
developments of human nature--a condition also which can hardly
again exist on this or any other continent, and which has,
therefore, a special value in the sum of human history."

Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point
of view. No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with
anything but respect and admiration. It is in books such as this,
then, that we may find something about the last stages of the
clearing of the frontier.

Even in Marcy's times the question of our Government's Indian
policy was a mooted one. He himself as an Army officer looked at
the matter philosophically, but his estimate of conditions was
exact. Long ago as he wrote, his conclusions were such as might
have been given forty years later.

"The limits of their accustomed range are rapidly contracting,
and their means of subsistence undergoing a corresponding
diminution. The white man is advancing with rapid strides upon
all sides of them, and they are forced to give way to his
encroachments. The time is not far distant when the buffalo will
become extinct, and they will then be compelled to adopt some
other mode of life than the chase for a subsistence.... No
man will quietly submit to starvation when food is within his
reach, and if he cannot obtain it honestly he will steal it or
take it by force. If, therefore, we do not induce them to engage
in agricultural avocations we shall in a few years have before us
the alternative of exterminating them or fighting them
perpetually. That they are destined ultimately to extinction does