Is it a wise or a politic thing in the Government to seek to brand the
Indian, in perpetuity, as a minor in the eye of the law? Repressing in
him anything like self-assertion, is not, to hold him such, fatal to his
self-respect? Does it not make him doubt his manhood entirely? Does it
really, save in the single respect of the restraining of his drinking,
conserve his true interests?
Is that a judicious law, which, while decreeing the Indian's disability
for making a contract with a white man, yet visits upon him no penalty
when he evades and contemns such law; which, guaranteeing to him
immunity for violating or dishonouring his engagement, prompts him to
cast about for some new and, haply, more admired expedient, whereby he
may circumvent and defraud his creditor? Is that an enviable position for
one to be placed in, who, ignorant of the disability I have mentioned,
and guileless enough to suppose, that an Indian, who has fair worldly
substance, when he gives a promissory note, means to pay it, and who, in
that belief, surrenders to him valuable property, only to find afterwards
that the debt is irrecoverable by legal process, and the chattels are
likewise, by moral, or any other effectual, process?
It will be said that the white should not be a party to a contract with
an Indian. Well, man is often trustful, and he does not always foresee
the disaster that his trustfulness shall incur. He frequently credits
his white fellow with an honourable instinct: why may he not, sometimes,
impute it to the Indian?
The law, so far as it involves the restraining of the Indian's drinking,
cannot be impeached: and in the application to the white of a similar
law lies the only solution of the temperance problem.