The Indian question is upon us as never before. Those in the Indian Territory and the few thousands in Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, North Carolina and other States, say 75,000 in all, are remnants of tribes who formerly lived east of the Mississippi River, are inclined to agriculture and domestic life, and have been considered superior to the nomadic tribes of the West. They long since ceased to trouble us, and are, at some places making commendable progress in education, stock raising and crops, besides generally holding their own in numbers. Still, to a large extent, they seem fixed in a half civilized, half pagan state, lacking their earlier manliness for the want of hardship and discipline in their lives, keeping up their heathen rites and dances, living in poverty, without law, demoralized more or less by annuities and destitute of the conditions that create character and self reliance. They need practical education. A few are already at Hampton and Carlisle; five hundred should have such an opportunity. More than this, their tribal relations should be broken up, homesteads inalienable for at least twenty-five years should be assigned, and they should be left as citizens of the several states in which they are, to vote and be voted on. Reservations are merely places for herding Indians; temporary, necessary experiments, that, after a given time, may become growing evils. Herding negroes in like manner would have been a curse to both white and black races. There has been more sentiment than sense in treating the Indian as a separate people. It was kindly meant but a cruel plan in its results. This part of the red race has suffered most from the whites; their comfortable eastern homes have been broken up, their thrifty farms and fruitful orchards abandoned for a western wilderness where thousands have died from exposure. Their record has been the saddest part of the “Century of Dishonor.” THE WILD TRIBES. The destruction of the buffalo has been more trying to the Indian than sudden emancipation was to the Negro. The latter changed the relations rather than the realities of life; the former the realities rather than their relations. The one remained on its old foundation of land and of labor—any shifting was voluntary. Game, the support of the other, has gradually failed and they have been roughly pushed from place to place till pauperism seems the only fixed fact of their life. The human machine after running for centuries does not readily reverse itself; the strain on the Indian is tremendous. Was greater ever put upon men?—force to control them, charity to weaken them. Justice demanded help, but wisdom demanded self-help as its condition. Exigency is man’s best teacher. “Necessity is the mother of invention;” it makes men creative. The facts of human nature, and of experience, have been ignored in our treaties with the Indians, probably because we never really conquered them, but purchased peace on the best terms we could make.