Unfortunately for the cause of pure philanthropy, the United States government was exceedingly slow in adopting the plan of Indian removal; but its citizens were by no means equally slow in developing the spirit of territorial expansion. Their successful seizure of West Florida had fired their ambition and their cupidity. With Texas annexed and lower Oregon occupied, the selection of the trans-Missouri region had ceased to be judicious. How could the Indians expect to be secure in a country that was the natural highway to a magnificent country beyond, invitingly open to settlement! But this very pertinent and patent fact the officials at Washington singularly failed to realize and they went on calmly assuring the Indians that they should never be disturbed again, that the federal government would protect them in their rights and against all enemies, that no white man should be allowed to intrude upon them, that they should hold their lands undiminished forever, and that no state or territorial lines should ever again circumscribe them. Such promises were decidedly fatuous, dead letters long before the ink that recorded them had had time to dry. The Mexican War followed the annexation of Texas and its conquests necessitated a further use of the Indian highway. Soldiers that fought in that war saw the Indian land and straightway coveted it. Forty-niners saw it and coveted it also. Prospectors and adventurers of all sorts laid plans for exploiting it. It entered as a determining factor into Benton's great scheme for building a national road that should connect the Atlantic and Pacific shores and with the inception of that came a very sudden and a very real danger; for the same great scheme precipitated, although in an indirect sort of way, the agitation for the opening up of Kansas and Nebraska to white settlement, which, of course, meant that the recent Indian colonists, in spite of all the solemn governmental guaranties that had been given to them, would have to be ousted, for would not the "sovereign" people of America demand it? Then, too, the Dred Scott decision, the result of a dishonorable political collusion as it was,[15] militated indirectly against Indian interests. It is true that it was only in its extra-legal aspect that it did this but it did it none the less; for, if the authority of the federal government was not supreme in the territories and not supreme in any part of the country not yet organized into states, then the Indian landed property rights in the West that rested exclusively upon federal grant, under the Removal Act of 1830, were virtually nil. It is rather interesting to observe, in this connection, how inconsistent human nature is when political expediency is the thing at stake; for it happened that the same people and the same party, identically, that, in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, had tried to convince the Indians, and against their better