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Show 4 REPORTS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR. and women and children with as diverse human characteristics as any equal groups of Germans or Italians. Thanks to the late Sena-torCHenry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, we have for eighteen years . been individualizing the Indian as an owner of real estate by breaking up, one at a time, the reservations set apart for whole tribes and establishing each Indian as a separate landholder on his own account. Thanks to ~e~resentat ivJoeh n .F. Lacey of Iowa, I hope that we shall soon be making the same sort of division of the tribal funds. At first, of course, the Government must keep its protecting hand on every Indian's property after it has beep assigned to him by book and deed; then, as one or another shows himself capable of passing out from under this tutelage he should be set fully free and given "the white man's chance," with the white man's obligations to bal-ance it. Finally, we must strive in every way possible to make the Indian an active factor in the upbuilding of the community in which he is going to live. The theory, too commonly cherished on the Mntier, that he is a sort of necessary nuisance surviving from a remote period, ii$e the sagebrush and the giant cactus, must be dispelled, and the way to dispel it is td turn him into a positive benefit. To this end I would, for instance, teach him to transact all of his financial businesq that he can in his nearest market town, instead of looking to the .. United States Treasury as the only source of material blessings. Any money of his which he can not use or is not using for his own current profit I should prefer to deposit' for him, in reasonably small parcels, in local banks which will bond themselves sufficiently for its safe-keeping, so that the industries of the neighborhood will have the use of it, and everybody thereabout will be the better off for such pros-perity as may come to an Indian depositor. On like grounds of rea-soning I should encourage every proper measure which points toward absolving the Indian from his obsolete relation to the licensed trader and teaches him to make his purchases from those merchants who will ask of him the fairest price, whether near the agency or at a distance. In short, our aim ought to be to keephim moving steadily down the path which leads from his close- domain of artificial restraints and arti6cial protection toward the broad area of individual liberty en-joyed by the ordinary citizen. Inbidentally to this programme, I should seek to makeof the Indian an independent laborer as distinguished from one for whom the Gov-ernment is continually straining itself to find something to do.. He can penetrate a humbug, even a benevolent humbug, as promptly as the next man; and when he sees the Government inventing purely fictitious needs to be supplied and making excuses of one kind and another to create a means of employment for him, he despises the whole thing as a fraud, like the white man whom some philanthro- |