Justice & Law Quote by Nelson A. Miles

A soldier promising brightness to a people he helped subdue is the kind of sentence that carries both balm and blade. Nelson A. Miles frames his claim as a rebuttal: "On the contrary" signals he is correcting some prevailing fatalism about Native peoples (the "unfortunate race") and their future. The apparent intent is reformist: treat them with "justice and humanity", provide "proper example" and "education", and history can pivot from "dark and painful" to "bright and prosperous."

The subtext is where the power - and the problem - sits. "Proper example" is a loaded phrase in a military mouth. It implies not just moral conduct but cultural modeling: a blueprint for how the "race" should become legible to the American state. Education appears not as mutual enrichment but as a technology of transformation, a promise that prosperity arrives through assimilation. The passive construction ("advantages of education given them") keeps agency squarely with the giver - the federal government, missionaries, administrators - rather than the people whose lives are being discussed.

Context matters: Miles was a central figure in the Indian Wars era, later serving as Commanding General of the U.S. Army. His career sits at the hinge between open warfare and the "humanitarian" policy regime that followed: reservations, boarding schools, and bureaucratic management marketed as uplift. The quote works rhetorically because it offers a clean moral equation - kindness plus schooling equals redemption - while quietly laundering conquest into benevolence. It is optimism with conditions, compassion with an asterisk, and it reveals how late-19th-century reform could coexist comfortably with dispossession.