In July, Congress met the emergency by the appointment and despatch of a Peace Commission. At its head was General Sherman, with a group of distinguished officers, two chief Indian Commissioners, and Senator Henderson, of Missouri. Sherman, after some very effective speeches to the Indians, left the further work to the other Peace Commissioners, who travelled far and wide over the Plains, for two thousand miles. They met the principal tribes in council, and made a series of treaties, which, with the distribution of presents, and the general view impressed upon the Indians in addresses, frank, friendly, and truthful, brought about a general pacification. In Stanley’s picturesque story of all this, perhaps the most striking feature is the speeches of the Indian chiefs as they set forth the feelings and wishes of their people. Said old Santanta; ‘I love the land and the buffalo, and will not part with them. I don’t want any of those medicine houses built in the country; I want the papooses brought up exactly as I am. I have word that you intend to settle us on a Reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle there. I love to roam over the wide prairie, and, when I do it, I feel free and happy; but, when we settle down, we grow pale and die.’ ‘Few,’ writes Stanley, ‘can read the speeches of the Indian chiefs without feeling deep sympathy for them; they move us by their pathos and mournful dignity. But they were asking the impossible. The half of a continent could not be kept as a buffalo pasture and hunting-ground.’ Reviewing the situation many years later, he pronounces that the decline and disappearance of the Indians has been primarily due, not to the wrongs by the whites, but to their innate savagery, their mutual slaughter, the ravages of disease, stimulated by unsanitary conditions; and, especially, the increased destructiveness of their inter-tribal wars, after they had obtained fire-arms from the whites. His account of the complaints laid before the Commissioners shows that there were real and many wrongs on the part of the whites. To one story of a wanton murder, and the comment, ‘Those things I tell you to show you that the pale-faces have done wrong as well as the Indians,’ that stout old veteran of the Plains, General Harney, replied: ‘That’s so, the Indians are a great deal better than we are.’ But of the broad purpose of the Government, and the spirit in which the Commission acted, Stanley writes: ‘These letters describe the great efforts made by the United States Government to save the unfortunate Indians from the consequences of their own rash acts. The speeches of General Hancock and General Sherman and the Peace Commissioners faithfully reflect the sentiments of the most cultivated Americans towards them, and are genuine exhortations to the Indians to stand aside from the overwhelming wave of white humanity which is resistlessly rolling towards the Pacific, and to take