"Bad faith and cruel harassment of the Indian tribes on their lonely reservations," he would say, "have characterized our government’s policy from the first, and forms, indeed, so gross a crime that coming ages will reprobate it wherever men love justice and hate swinish greed. It will not in any way excuse us that we are hungry for the property of our neighbors, and because of this agree to treat the Indian as an inferior being. He is nothing of the kind, for God never made more perfect men physically, and the mind conforms in all things to the body. It is nature’s law. Nor does it excuse our acts, however much our passions may be aroused, that the Indian in his savage state kills and mutilates his enemy. Achilles, the ideal Greek, circling the walls of ancient Troy with Hector’s body chained to his chariot, has never been surpassed in cruelty and ignoble pride in Indian annals. The comparison is still more odious when we think of the hecatombs of harmless men the Homeric Greeks sacrificed to the manes of their honored dead. The Indian’s heaven is lighted by no such baleful fires. Nor have we any reason to suppose the red man more backward than the Greek, for he is greater in courage and much superior to him in physical strength and patient endurance." "If Achilles lived in our day," Uncle Job once answered, "we would not lose an hour in appropriating his incomparable horses and sending him to the wilds of Iowa to join that other savage, Black Hawk, saying to ourselves the while that we were well rid of a nuisance and disturber of the peace. Too much can’t be expected, though, of our young country, Henry. It is too full of the bumptious exuberance of animal life. Children in experience make very poor governors; they are too headstrong and intolerant; but we will do better later on. Only mature nations, like mature men, know how to govern well. It’s a pity, but so it is, and will be always, and the weak and dependent must suffer whenever contrary conditions exist." Thus tender-hearted men declaimed in the years that are gone, but fruitlessly. These thoughts, however out of place, recur to me now and struggle for utterance when my mind reverts to the gentle being who came into my life that evening, and who afterward, and so long as she lived, did so much to add to the happiness and well-being of those with whom she was brought in contact.