Carrying the Indian from helplessness to self support is the most difficult administrative problem of our country. The Negro has taken care of himself. “The forty acres and a mule” method would have ruined the race. He was thrown on himself and given a vote; dangerous as it once seemed, who would now have it otherwise? He struggled, suffered and succeeded. The Indian is fed “till he shall become self-supporting,” which gives him a motive for not becoming so. He alone of all men on the earth, finds in industry not reward but a penalty. The Shoshone farmers, when a reduction of rations was suggested, threatened to stop cultivating their fields. A few may go to work, but the whole line will not move forward while rations and other gratuities are issued, as now, to lines of ragged, wretched-looking mendicants who are helped for the asking. Treaties must be kept, but the treaties contemplate ultimate self-support and the necessity of education to that end. It is, I believe, quite within their spirit to withhold supplies from the lazy and intractable. At Yankton, Devil’s Lake, Cheyenne River and at other points, efficient agents kept the schools full, and the Indians busy by the argument to the stomach, which is their weak point. It is, I believe, the starting point of Indian civilization. The plan is as excellent as it is unusual. On the Fort Hall reservation, in Idaho, I recently saw fields of wheat, oats and potatoes; two-thirds of the tribe had become farmers, besides owning herds of cattle, because a former agent had issued the coffee and sugar rations, which the red man dearly loves, only as each one successively staked out, plowed and planted his allotted little farm. The nation’s gratuities may do the Indian as much good as they are doing him harm, if wisely administered, especially the luxuries, which afford the best leverage. He is managed now by a class of men whose title, in spite of shining exceptions among them, is a byword and a reproach. Decayed clergymen, hungry politicians, and the broken of every profession, are not the ones to make citizens of the red man. Fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars a year will not secure first-class men, who must travel far with their families, at their own expense, and be liable at any day to discharge and disgrace. By refusing adequate salaries, Congress (and Congress means the people) decides that the Indian’s greatest need shall be unsupplied, for lack of a trifling comparative cost. Millions for fuel and dry goods, but not one or two hundred thousand dollars more that men of repute and of capacity may go to the Agencies. Good beef and flour and shoes, but second-rate men, whose average official life is less than two years, is the present provision for them.