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top right margin headnote: obligations to individuals - first branch - commission under the 17th article two courses the Commission in question could choose, either might be liable to exception. Had the bounds set by the Treaty been alone consulted, the sum there limited would have rendered the power of the Commission exceedingly barren & incomplete. But, in making adjudications beyond the sum limited by the United States, it surely took the more philanthropic alternative, -- and perhaps not an entirely unsafe one, -- because a special law gives all Indians a claim to just payment for whatever is taken from them collectively or individually, and the Commission might have considered that it would be borne out by that law, where the Treaty fell short. As for the amounts to which the Treaty limits the payment for the specific objects placed by it under the control of the Commission, that they were inadequate had been long understood. Indeed, this very inadequacy appears to have formed one great cause of the unconquerable resistance of certain Cherokee Chiefs & of the mass of the nation, to all the propositions of the United States for a Treaty rendered nugatory by such imperfect provisions. From time to time the particular allotments were enlarged, but never to an extent which could reconcile the people to the Treaty, or persuade the best informed of them even to appear among the claimants under an arrangement which they