If this be true, what about the vast holders of land whom our laws cherish and protect? Are they holding the land for useful and good purposes? Are they “helping on the cause of civilization” by their merciless and grasping control of the millions of acres they have generally so unlawfully and immorally secured? Thousands, nay millions, of acres are held by comparatively few men, without one thought for the common good. The only idea in the minds of these men is the selfish one: “What can I make out of it?” Let us be honest with ourselves and call things by their proper names in our treatment of the weaker race. If the Indian is in the way and we are determined to take his land from him, let us at least be manly enough to recognize ourselves as thieves and robbers, and do the act as the old barons of Europe used to do it, by force of arms, fairly and cheerfully: “You have these broad acres: I want them. I challenge you to hold them: to the victor belongs the spoils.” Then the joust began. And he who was the stronger gained the acres and the castle. Let us go to the Indian and say: “I want your lands, your hunting-grounds, your forests, your water-holes, your springs, your rivers, your corn-fields, your mountains, your canyons. I need them for my own use. I am stronger than you; there are more of us than there are of you. I’ve got to have them. You will have to do with less. I’m going to take them;” and then proceed to the robbery. But let us be above the contemptible meanness of calling our theft “benevolent assimilation,” or “manifest destiny,” or “seeking the higher good of the Indian.” A nation as well as a race may do scoundrel acts, but let it not add to its other evil the contemptible crime of conscious hypocrisy. The unconscious hypocrite is to be pitied as well as shaken out of his hypocrisy, but the conscious hypocrite is a stench in the nostrils of all honest men and women. The major part of the common people of the United States have been unconscious of the hypocritical treatment that has been accorded the Indians by their leaders, whether these leaders were elected or appointed officials or self-elected philanthropists and reformers. Hence, while I would “shake them up” and make them conscious of their share in the nation’s hypocrisy, I have no feeling of condemnation for them. On the other hand, I feel towards the conscious humbugs and hypocrites, who use the Indian as a cloak for their own selfish aggrandizement and advancement, as the Lord is said to have felt toward the lukewarm churches when He exclaimed: “I will spew thee out of my mouth.”