them, in fact, as communities of Mennonites, Mormons, or Norwegians, or other nationalities would be treated in the United States. When the Reservations were first established it was considered impossible that the migration of the whites would extend to the remote regions of the west to which the unfortunate survivors of the people with whose virtues and vices Cooper and other novelists have made us familiar were gradually and often remorselessly driven. It is a plea which will be urged in bar of judgment that the doctrine of States Rights prevented the interference of the United States Government on behalf of the Indian tribes who were often ruthlessly destroyed. But it will scarcely be a plea, I think, which humanity in full court would recognise as valid. _Homo homini lupus._ But to the Red Man as to the Black in many cases the White Man is worse than any wolf; far more bloodthirsty and rapacious than any tiger--a Cain of Cains. It was our own kith and kin who, landing on the shores of the North American continent, encroaching by degrees upon the tribes and at last encountering their hostility, spread their sway literally by fire and sword, and rooted out the Red Man wherever they found him established on land or by sea which they coveted. We, whose countrymen have worked out the same policy on the Australian continent and Van Diemen's Land, and who can only be restrained from its pursuit in New Zealand by the strong arm of the Home Government, can scarcely afford to take up stones to fling at our American brethren; and it is not with any purpose of indictment or accusation that I proceed to make a few remarks on the relations of the United States Government with the Red Man, and the efforts which they have been making to compensate the Indians in some measure for the injustice and persecution dealt out for many a generation. As I looked at the men gathered at some of the railroad stations in the western desert and thought of the Red Men whose fate it is to meet such representatives of civilisation and Christianity, I could not but be filled with pity for the unfortunates and with wonder at "the dispensation" under which they live. The faces are fine and bold enough, bearded to the cheek or shaved in the American fashion, with bold staring eyes, which "look square" in your own, with a general expression "Do you want a fight?" in them--the heads to which they belong are generally set on muscular bodies. If a gang of these men think fit to go on to an Indian reservation--the very name is too often a bitter mockery--who is to stop them? If the Indians try to do so and one of the white intruders is killed the country-side rings with cries of "vengeance for the massacre of our brethren," and all the papers are filled with accounts of "Another Indian Outbreak."