It is impossible to avoid making the remark, in this place, that there is a class of men who have no “families”; who are ever ready to renounce the “comforts and attractions of civilization”; who are accustomed to “live lives of anxiety and toil”; and who are impervious to “suspicion, detraction, and calumny,” while at the same time they are “able, upright, and thoroughly competent.” If the government, when it inaugurated its plan of filling the Indian agencies with men nominated by “the churches,” had allowed our bishops to nominate agents in proportion to the number of Catholic Indians, the chances are that the right men would have been forthcoming, and the commissioner would not now be complaining that, in order to keep an Indian agent from stealing, he must be paid $3,000 a year. “Relief had been so long delayed,” says the same officer in the same report, “that supplies failed to reach the agencies until the Indians were in almost a starving condition, and until the apparent intention of the government to abandon them to starvation had induced large numbers to join the hostile bands under Sitting Bull.” Two other instances of the same kind are mentioned; and a third is recorded, in which, owing to the failure of Congress to provide money promised by a treaty, “hundreds of Pawnees had been compelled to abandon their agency, to live by begging and stealing in southern Kansas.” “In numerous other instances,” adds the commissioner pathetically, “the funds at the disposal of this office have been so limited as to make it a matter of the utmost difficulty to keep the Indians from starving”—and this, too, when the same Indians had large sums of money standing to their credit held “in trust” for them in the treasury of the United States. A long discussion advocating the removal of all the Indians to a few reservations—although this could not be done without violations of the most solemn treaties—is clinched with the cynical remark that “there is a very general and growing opinion that observance of the strict letter of treaties with Indians is in many cases at variance both with their own best interests and with sound public policy.”