the public lands, by its Homestead Law, and by its Land Bounty Acts, is that 160 acres of land is the normal quantity for an ordinary farm; general experience has shown that this is none too much. But if the attempt were made to arrange the 266,151 Indians into families of 4 persons each, and to allot to each family a farm of 160 acres, there would not be tillable land enough “to go round”; 9,617 families would be left out of the distribution. We do not mean to say that a farm of something less than 160 acres may not be found sufficient for the maintenance of a family of four persons; but we do wish to call attention to the fact that the Indian reservations have been now reduced so far that only 56,920 farms, of 160 acres each, of “tillable land” remain in them. There is the more necessity for accentuating this fact since even in the last report of the commissioner is repeated the suggestion that the reservations are still too large, and that a few more treaties might be broken and a few more sanguinary wars provoked with advantage, in order to reduce further the area set apart for Indian occupation. This suggestion is made plausible by the device of calling attention to the whole area of the reservations—159,287,778 acres, or 248,886 square miles—while hiding away in very small type, and at the end of an intricate table of figures, the fact that 150,180,534 acres, or 234,656 square miles, of these lands are wholly unfitted for tillage, and can never be made available for agricultural purposes. The number of acres of land cultivated by the Indians during the year covered by the last report of the commissioner was 318,194, and 28,253 other acres were broken by them during the year. No less than 26,873 full-blood male Indians were laboring in civilized pursuits, exclusive of those belonging to the five civilized tribes in the Indian Territory. These people are not savages; they worship God—many of them enjoying the light of Catholic truth; they educate themselves and their children; they live in houses and wear decent clothes; they toil and are producers of valuable articles. Let us see, now, what is said about these and the other Indians less advanced in civilization, by their rulers, the successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs and their subordinates, the agents. When we remark that we select our quotations from nine volumes of official reports, the reader will understand that we lay before him only a very few out of the numberless proofs of two facts: 1. That the commissioners, while repeatedly confessing that the Indians have been most cruelly and unwisely wronged in the past, are of the opinion that it would be a kind and wise thing to wrong them a little more in the future.