wherever the white man went, he came in contact with the original occupants of the soil. The Pilgrim Fathers met them when they landed at Plymouth; the settlers of New York found them on Manhattan Island, and the old adventurers in the interior of the State overtook them on the Hudson and the Mohawk. As civilization pressed its way westward through Pennsylvania, Ohio, the prairies of the Middle States, and the mountains of the Far West, even to the Pacific Ocean, it everywhere encountered the red men, for this vast territory was their home. Countless herds of buffalo provided them with food, raiment, shelter, commerce, occupation, and amusement. The boundless lakes and rivers furnished them an inexhaustible supply of fish, and in their rude way they wrested from Nature an abundant provision for all their simple wants. The great Spirit who made them, Gitche Manitou the mighty, had said:

"I have given you lands to hunt in,
I have given you streams to fish in,
I have given you bear and bison,
I have given you roe and reindeer,
I have given you brant and beaver,
Filled the marshes full of wild fowl,
Filled the rivers full of fishes;"

and slowly they were developing on this soil a civilization of their own, for all was theirs. They had their languages, their arts, their social customs, their religious ceremonies, their forms of government, and they were not to be despised when they assembled,

"Clad in all their richest raiment,

Robes of fur and belts of wampum,
Splendid with their paint and plumage,
Beautiful with beads and tassels."

If they had been left themselves to work out their own destiny, we cannot predict to what they might have attained ere this by the ordinary process of evolution. It is fair to presume that, under favorable circumstances, they would have developed a very creditable civilization in the time that it has taken the Anglo-Saxons to unfold that of which they are so justly proud, for there is much to admire in the Indian character.

But, by sheer force of numbers, the overwhelming weight of our modes of warfare and our superior arts of diplomacy, we

have slowly but remorselessly dispossessed them of their lands, arrested their development, destroyed their autonomy, subjected them to a condition even more deplorable in some respects than that of the Africans whom we enslaved, and have rendered it well-nigh impossible for many of them, without assistance, even to support life.

Our Treatment of Negroes and Indians.

Our treatment of the Africans has been very severely condemned and is not susceptible of justification, but this may be said of it: That, by scattering the black people throughout the entire South, employing them as house-servants, as coachmen, as common laborers, and even with the lash forcing them to toil in the cotton and the rice fields, we taught them English, acquainted them with our modes of life, compelled them to be industrious, thus making it possible for them, when the shackles of slavery were removed, to become self-supporting, independent citizens.

But we have not dealt thus with the Indians, have not taken them into our homes, our shops and our fields; on the contrary, we have excluded them, have kept alive between them and us bitter antagonisms, and have made of them a peculiar and alien people, rendering it morally impossible for them either to accept of our civilization or to become assimilated with us. At the same time, by the very necessities of our national growth and the expansion of our population, we have deprived them of their natural resources, made it impossible for them to secure a livelihood by fishing and hunting; have destroyed the buffalo, upon which they depended for food, and have broken up their nomadic habits, by which they wandered with the sun, took advantage of the change of the seasons, and pitched their tents when and where the circumstances of nature were most favorable to their profit and pleasure.

Ought we not to offer them a substitute for all this? And what is that substitute? Simply this that at an early age their little ones shall be placed in school and be kept there until they have become, in their tastes, habits and characters, civilized be ings, able to compete with us on our own lines.

On the soil once theirs, out of the mines that they owned, from the inexhaustible

riches of nature which they enjoyed in undisputed possession, we have created the mightiest nation on the face of the earth. Our banks are filled with money; our homes are supplied with every luxury; and everywhere rise monuments of our industry, our skill, our intelligence, our wealth, our power. Surely, out of this overflowing abundance, something can be spared, in order that the descendants of those whose loss made all this possible for us, may learn how to use to profitable advantage the little patches of earth, often semiarid, mountainous, or sterile, which we are pleased to allot to them in severalty. Jus tice demands it. Said Washington in his farewell address:

"It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence."

The Plea of Economy.

This expenditure from the national Treas. ury for the education of these children can be justified on the ground of economy. The money this nation has spent in its care of the Indians, including the cost of Indian wars, has been estimated at not less than a thousand millions of dollars, and by reason of our failure in the past to render them selfsupporting, we are still compelled to expend considerable sums annually for their care and sustenance. It is possible for us to continue to grow barbarians, if we think that industry is profitable and desirable, for, as I have shown, the Indian babies are destined to become Indian barbarians if the conditions remain what they now are on many reservations. We can, however, if we will, at once take the larger part of them out of this degrading and every way deplorable environment and surround them with such influences as will insure their development and render them capable, by education, of maintaining themselves; thus throwing them upon their own resources, and treating them as we treat any other class of our fellow citizens. The reservations now com

prise nearly 100,000,000 acres of land, a large proportion of which can never be utilized by them, as they have neither the capital, the knowledge, the means, nor the inclination to develop the grazing, agricultural or mineral resources of this vast region. A wild |

Indian requires a thousand acres to roam over, while an intelligent man will find a comfortable support for his family on a very small tract. When the rising generation have become civilized, and have learned how to utilize the land they live on, a vast domain, now useless, can be thrown open to settlement and become the seat of great farms, happy homes, thriving towns and cities and vast mining and commercial industries. Barbarism is costly, wasteful and ex'ravagant. Intelligence promotes thrift and increases prosperity.

If these Indian babies could speak for themselves they would say: "We protest against being treated as paupers and do not want to be dependent upon the public Treasury. We have a little pride, and blush to be fed as cattle are fed. We hate to be different from everybody else, and have the finger of scorn pointed at us as those who are fed on public rations and clothed with public garments; we wish to stand alone, to feed and clothe ourselves, to do our share of public work, and to be able to lend a helping hand to those of our fellow-creatures, red or white, who may need assistance."

Certainly it is cheaper, if we look only at the matter of dollars and cents, to educate the rising generation than it is either to feed them or fight them, and the growing of savages as a national industry is neither honorable nor profitable.

The Plea of Consistency.

In asking that ample provision be made. for all Indian children of school age under its immediate care, it is only demanded that the Government shall be self-consistent. In 1877, after a hundred years of experimenting with the problem, the work of the sys. tematic education of Indian children at the public expense was begun, by the appropriation by Congress for that purpose of the sum of $30,000, which amount has been increased from year to year, until for 1892 it reached the sum of $2,291,650.

From this it is apparent that the Government has fully committed itself to this great work, which it is in duty bound to continue clusively shown either that what it has atuntil it is accomplished, or until it is contempted is unattainable or that the methods adopted are unwise and inefficient.

An Admirable School System. The present condition of the Government

Indian school system is, considering all the circumstances, admirable. The schools have been organized with great care, are managed economically and efficiently, and are accom. plishing their important work most satisfactorily. A carefully graded course of study, extending through eight years, is in use; the schools have been put under the rules of the Civil Service; the Indian country has been divided into districts, each under an expert school supervisor; a compulsory law is now in operation; there is a regular plan of promotion from lower to higher schools, and the health and morals of the pupils receive careful attention. Systematic training is given to the girls in domestic industries, and to boys in farming, stock-raising, bee-keeping, gardening, fruit-raising, dairying, carpentry, blacksmithing, wagon-making, shoe-making, tailoring, harness-making, broom-making, printing, and other handicrafts. The number enrolled in the various schools supported in whole or in part by the Government, for the year ending June 30, 1891, was nearly 18,000, or more than half the entire number, and it is expected that that number will be increased to 20,000 before the close of the present year.

There has never been such progress in the establishment and operation of schools and the promotion of the work of Indian education as is being made at the present time. The impulse that has been given to this work during the past few years has been very great, and the speed at which it is now progressing is such that, if left unchecked, it will not be long before provision will have been made for the education of every Indian child of suitable age and health. Then it is simply a question of time, and that a comparatively short time, when these thousands of young people will emerge from these schools acquainted with the English language and the ways of civilized life; with skill in some handiwork, a taste for civilization, characters well formed, and an equipment sufficient, under any ordinarily favorable circumstances, to enable them to earn an honest living and to acquit themselves in the struggle of life as men and

women.

To question the utility of these schools is as unwise as to ask whether water runs down hill or smoke ascends. They are a constant force, operating with increasing effectiveness in doing for the Indians what

similar schools have done for our own and for every other race that has ever risen above the plane of barbarism. No people ever became civilized without the aid of schools of learning. To check their work now would be not only an act of inconsistency on the part of the Government and a gross injustice to the pupils in the schools and the others that ought to be, but well nigh a crime against humanity.

A Menace to Civilization.

Then, again, it should be borne in mind that this plea for money for the education of Indian children is a plea, not for them only, but for their white neighbors as well. The Indians are here to stay, we cannot get rid of them, they are a permanent factor in our civilization, and at the present rate of decrease, even if there be a decrease, they are certainly good for another century.

The complications that have risen in the past by reason of the contact of civilization with this crude mass of barbarism are suf. ficient warning that we must not expect a greatly improved condition of things in the future, unless there shall be a radical change in our methods of treatment.

To leave these thousands of children to grow up in ignorance, superstition, barbarism, and even savagery, is to maintain a perpetual menace to our western civilization and to fasten upon the rapidly developing States of the West, where the Indians are mostly found, an incubus that will hinder their progress, arrest their growth, threaten their peace, and be continually, as long as it remains, a source of unrest and of perplexity.

To educate them, and thus fit them for citizenship and for blending peacefully with their white neighbors, is to remove this burden, this source of perplexity, and this menace. In behalf, therefore, of our own people, of our own children, of those who are building homes in our Western States and Territories, those who are developing our new civilization under discouraging circumstances, it is simply an act of wise statesmanship to devote from the public Treasury a sufficient sum of money to educate every Indian child, turning him from an enemy into a friend of our civilization.

It should also be borne in mind that the money expended on these schools is put at once into circulation in their immediate

National Honor.

Finally, this plea for the papoose may rest upon the broad ground of national honor. The people of the United States pride themselves upon their magnificent history, their unparalleled growth, their marvelous wealth and power. They claim, too, to be the highest example yet produced of a great, enlightened, free people, a preeminently Christian nation. From the landing of the Mayflower down to the present, our nation has been distinguished for its magnificent deeds: the Declaration of Independence, the formation of the Constitution, the emancipation of the slave, have all manifested the greatness of our national spirit.

We have asked the nations of the earth to scnd their representatives to the great Exposition to be held in 1893 in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, and the idea most prominently forced into the minds of many of the visitors to that Exposition will be the marvelous contrast between what this country was as possessed by the Indians when Columbus discovered it, and what it is today under the civilization of the white man. To us the question will arise again and again and again, "What have we done for the Indian during the progress of this wonderful national growth?"

The answer to this question, which will suggest itself to many minds, will be that our record is one of dishonor. While this indictment is not wholly just; while there is very much to be said in justification of

the course we have pursued; and while an indictment may be preferred against the Indians themselves for their conduct in the centuries that have gone by, it still remains true that this mighty nation stands to-day upon the soil which we have wrested from the red man, and while we have grown mighty in numbers, he remains a mere handful: 66,000,000 against 250,000. Surely we can afford not simply to be just to this remnant of a once proud race but to be generous, and it might well awaken in the heart of every American a sense of pride and national self-respect, if on that occasion he could point to the one great fact that the United States has made provision for the education of every Indian child within its borders; that whatever may be said of the record of the past, the future is made sure; that the face of the papoose no longer looks backward, but at last forward; and that for his golden age he does not need to turn to the happy hunting grounds of the past and fill his imagination with the stories of wild adventure or war, but that he may look forward to a blending of his race with the race of the conqueror, and to participation in all the glories of our future greatness.

A Striking Contrast.

in severalty and individualizing property, and the building of family homes, is extending rapidly. Then, education had made little progress among them; now, more than half their children are in school, and there is a rapidly increasing desire for educational advantages. Then, heathen customs and ceremonies were largely universal; now, thousands of them are enrolled as members of Christian churches, and missionary work among them is in a very hopeful condition. Then, they lived almost entirely in tepees, and dressed chiefly in the skins of animals; now, a large number live in permanent houses, and it is rare to find one who does not wear at least a portion of citizen's dress, while thousands of them dress as white people do.

Twenty-five years ago the Governmenmaintained everywhere through the Indian country expensive military posts for the purpose of keeping them in check, and protecting the white settlers from their ent croachments. Within a few years more than twenty of these posts have been abandoned, and the War Department is contemplating the abandonment of others at an early day. A number of them have already been converted into Indian schools, and, in this connection, it is a significant fact that two thousand Indians are being enrolled as soldiers in the United States Army, and are to be used in maintaining order, not only among themselves, but wherever their services may be required in the interests of peace.

Then, the drift of the Indians was toward the West; now, it is recognized as an estab lished principle that they are to be permanent residents of their respective localities. Then, the papoose was born into well-nigh hopeless barbarism; he opened his eyes upon the world in the midst of the gathering shadows of despair; he was an alien, an outcast; to-day he is born into a hopeful environment; he looks toward citizenship. Then, there was a well nigh universal sentiment among us of distrust, suspicion, hatred, or, at least, of indifference, for the Indians, which in its worst form found utterance in the hateful expression that "The only good Indian is a dead Indian"; to-day, the sentiment of the people in general is that of pity for the Indian, of respect for his rights, of a desire to do him justice, and, on the part of an increasing number, an earnest wish to extend to him the privi

leges of education, the blessings of civilization, and the fellowship of brotherhood.

Education Civilizes.

Among the causes that have been most potent in bringing about this marvelous change has been education. Every school established has been an agency of civilization, and to-day, throughout the entire country, the educated Indians are the progressive ones. They are, for the most part, the interpreters, and those whose good offices have been solicited in securing from the different tribes the cession of their surplus lands and inducing them to accept of land in severalty. The returned students have Explained to their people the kindly purpose of the Government toward them, have allayed suspicion, have arrested disquiet, have promoted peace, and have in a wonderful way helped to bring about that condition of things which I have above described. The influence of these schools of learning in promoting the civilization of these people, in bringing about and maintaining peace between them and the whites, and in preparing them for citizenship and absorption into our national life, has been all and more than the most ardent friends of Indian education could have expected.

Nothwithstanding all that may be said by pessimistic observers, the fact remains that they have entered on a new era, and that there is for them an outlook and a future. The old order of things is passing away, and a new one is dawning. The rising generation of Indians, the children that are coming upon the scene to-day, look forward and not backward. Their faces are illumined by the rising sun, their hearts are big with hope, their minds are expanded with expectation, their little hands are outstretched, eager to grasp that which the future seems about to bestow upon them.

Shall they be disappointed? Shall their hopes be blasted? Shall the sun be turned back in its course for them? Must they again set their faces toward the setting sun? Shall schools be closed to them, and they be forced back into the gloom and despair of the past, instead of being allowed to press forward into the glory of the future? Justice, philanthrophy, patriotism, Christianity, answer "No!" And let all the people, speaking through their representatives in Congress, answer "No!" Give the papoose a chance!