disappointments of sanguine expectation; and thus the service has at times suffered from the general indifference scarcely less than from the sharpest revulsions of public feeling. Much has been said within the past three years, of the Indian policy of the administration; and, if by this is meant that the policy of the government in dealing with the Indians has become more and more one of administration, and less and less one of law, the phrase, with the exception of an article too many, is well enough. As matter of fact, the sole Indian policy of the United States deserving the name was adopted early in the century; and it is only of late years that it has been seriously undermined by the current of events; while it is within the duration of the present administration that the blow has been struck by legislation, at the already tottering structure, which has brought it nearly to its fall. To throw upon a dozen religious and benevolent societies the responsibility of advising the executive in the appointment of the agents of the Indian service is not a policy. To buy off a few bands, more insolent than the rest, by a wholesale issue of subsistence and the lavish bestowal of presents, without reference to the disposition of the savages to labor for their own support, and even without reference to the good or ill desert of individuals,--this, though doubtless expedient in the critical situation of our frontier population, is the merest expediency, not in any sense a policy. Yet the two features specified have been the only ones that have been added to the scheme of Indian control during the continuance of the present administration; while, on the other side, an irreparable breach has been effected in that scheme by the action of powerful social forces, as well as by the direct legislative contravention of its most vital principle.