The actually or potentially hostile tribes of the United States number, on a rough computation suited to the rudeness of the definition, sixty-four thousand. It is these only which we have to treat under the first division of our question,--What shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress? This number of sixty-four thousand is made up as follows: The actually depredating bands, North-west and South-west, probably have not exceeded, during the past year, seven thousand, mainly Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches. The tribes with which these bands are directly and intimately connected contain about twenty thousand, including the marauders. There are further included in this calculation tribes and bands, numbering in the aggregate about forty-four thousand, which are now generally at peace. It will be seen that the number which we have taken for the potentially hostile Indians is many times greater than the number of the actually hostile. Yet, on the other hand, we have not intended to embrace all those tribes which might be exasperated to the point of resistance by a reckless disregard of treaties on the part of the government, or by a series of wanton acts of abuse on the part of white settlers. There is a line beyond which no man or people may safely be pressed; and there are few bands of Indians, East or West, however contemptible in numbers or character, which, if wronged and trampled on, might not in their indignant despair teach their oppressors a lesson at which the world would shudder. We are contemplating no such possibilities. We are assuming that the government will, as it has generally done in the past, respect treaty obligations, and that the intercourse of the Indians with their white neighbors will be marked by only such sporadic acts of individual wrong as are in the nature of the case. The tribes to which we refer as potentially hostile are, first, those now in immediate contact with the whites, whose claims to territory are so far disregarded, either by the action of the government or by the unauthorized intrusion of pioneers and prospectors; or whose means of subsistence are so far impaired or threatened by the extension of railways and settlements,--that hostilities are only prevented by the bounty of the government in feeding the members of such tribes in whole or in part, by liberal presents of trinkets and useful goods, by the exercise of especial watchfulness in avoiding occasions of dispute and points of collision, and finally by a willingness on the part of the government to overlook offences and even to tolerate a degree of insolence, rather than allow a breach of the peace: second, those tribes not now to any great extent in contact with the whites, and exhibiting no desire to go out of their way to make trouble, but of which the same must, in the inevitable course of the national progress, in a few years become true as of the tribes embraced under the first class.