H. A. STIMSON, A. F. SHERRILL, S. R. RIGGS WM. CRAWFORD, M. B. WILDER, JOSEPH HART, E. P. SMITH.
I stand before you to speak upon the Indian question with an inexpressible sadness. The hopelessness of securing justice or mercy for the Indian oppresses me. I seem to hear the cry of the Pilgrim’s saintly pastor, when the news came to him across the ocean of their first fight with the natives of New England, “I would that you had converted some before you killed any.” Our injustice and oppression of the Indian are not the slow growth of years, as they have been to-day shown to be in the case of the negro; they sprang into being full armed, bitter and destructive, like the spirits from Pandora’s box. As early as 1675 the devoted John Eliot wrote to Gov. Winthrop from the wigwams in which he was consecrating his culture and his life to their conversion: “I humbly request that one effect of this trouble may be to humble the English to do the Indians justice.” (Letter to Hon. Mr. Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut. Roxbury, this 24th of the fifth month, 1675.) The prayer has remained unanswered through the centuries.
I am oppressed with the necessity of arraigning my Government and my country of crime. It is but a short time since England was horrified with the account of the barbarous atrocities committed by an English governor upon the blacks of Jamaica. A committee was at once formed, as an expression of the best sentiment of England, for the purpose of bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. Reviewing the work of the Jamaica committee, of which he had been chairman, John Stuart Mill records its failure. It was defeated not by the law, but by the grand jury, the representatives of the people. “It was not a popular proceeding,” he writes, “in the eyes of the great middle classes of England to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed against negroes.” (Autobiography, pp. 296-9.) It is as unpopular to arraign our Government for abuse of the Indian to-day. A single sentence, however, of Mr. Mill’s gives me courage to proceed. He says: “The Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s charge settled the law for the future.” It may be that some simple statements of fact may open the eyes of our people and prepare the way for redress.