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Show 4 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. the privilege of every person in this country. The educational system is therefore a broad and comprehensive one, and includes not only that whicl~i s taught the white boy and girl in our public schools, but also that which they learn at the fireside and in Christian homes. Their thougbts are turned from the tepee, the chase, and the barbrtrjc ease of a savage life, when they would "Wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantsstio summer's heat" to the practical realities of their present condition, aud the manifest advantage of the white man's manners, customs, and habits. However desirable, it does not as yet seem practicable, in this gen-eration at least, to segregate the great body of Indians and distribute them throughout the country. Hence conditions have necessarily fixed and limited an educational poliey for their benefit. This policy, by force of circumstances, is based upon the well-known inferiority of the great mass of Indians in religion, intelligence, morals, aud home life. Their theory and practice of existerlce has been antag-onistic to that of the more fortunate whites, who have behind them long ages of slow and successful progress and struggle fo; supremacy. Originally kind-hearted, contact with the European strangers who landed on the shores of his country, and were themselves just cmerg-ing from the superstitions of the Dark Ages, did not tend to impress him with any very great love for those who introduced themselves for purposesof their own aggrandizement; nor has the attitude of his con-querors for many years si~lceg iven him a different conception of them. Naturally filled with a Iove of his country and its vast bunting gronndr, he has seen them gradually slipping from his grasp and becoming the abiding place of those whom he at first welcomed to his shores. But, notwithstanding all these years of appropriation and oppression, earnest men and women have held faith in the justice of the Indians' right to existence, a home, and final absorptio~l into the body politic of their country. To the superficial observer and harsh critic the task of pre-paring them for the rights of citizenship has seemed hopeless as well as farcical, but the experience of the past few years under the present educational plan has fully demonstrated that the 111diansp ossess as a race those germs of intelligence, morality, and domesticity which by careful nurture can and have developed in thousands of instances resnlts as excellent as those displayed in their white neighbors. It is a wonderful work in which the Crovernment is engaged, and a visit to the schools will astonish the most unsympathetic. On the res-ervation will be seen the half-naked, often filthy and vermin-infected, ehildren brought in from the camps and placedin the little daysohools to receive there their first instruction in thepractical applicationof the maxim "cleanliness is next to godliness." Filled with superstitions, and rebellions, wild, and intractable, in the hands of the teacher the work of regeneration begins, to he. continued on through the reserva- |