The strong arguments in favor of military control were founded largely on the permanency of tenure in the army. Political appointments were fewer, the average of personal character and devotion was higher. Army administration had fewer scandals than had that of the Indian Bureau. The partisan on either side in the sixties was prone to believe that his favorite branch of the service was honest and wise, while the other was inefficient, foolish, and corrupt. He failed to see that in the earliest phase of the policy, when there was no friction, and consequently little fighting, the problem was essentially civilian; that in the next period, when constant friction was provoking wars, it had become military; and that finally, when emigration and transportation had changed friction into overwhelming pressure, the wars would again cease. A large share of the disputes were due to the misunderstandings as to whether, in particular cases, the tribes should be under the bureau or the army. On the whole, even when the tribes were hostile, army control tended to increase the cost of management and the chance of injustice. There never was a time when a few thousand Indian police, with the ideals of police rather than those of soldiers, could not have done better than the army did. But the student, attacking the problem from afar, is as unable to solve it fully and justly as were its immediate custodians. He can at most steer in between the badly biassed "Century of Dishonor" of Mrs. Jackson, and the outrageous cry of the radical army and the frontier, that the Indian must go. The demand of the army for the control of the Indians was never gratified. Around 1870 its friends were insistent that since the army had to bear the knocks of the Indian policy,--knocks, they claimed, generally due to mistakes of the bureau,--it ought to have the whole responsibility and the whole credit. The inertia which attaches to federal reforms held this one back, while the Indian problem itself changed in the seventies so as to make it unnecessary. Once the great wars of the sixties were done the tribes subsided into general peace. Their vigorous resistance was confined to the years when the last great wave of the white advance was surging over them. Then, confined to their reservations, they resumed the march to civilization.