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Show 6 REPORTS OF THE DEPA~MENT OF THE INTERIOR. to deserve and the ambition to ask for the best there is in ~me&can education is likely to be refused. All that I have asserted is-what anybody familiar'with the field can see for himself-that the mass of Indian children, like the corresponding mass of white children, are not prepared for conveyance beyond the elementary studies. They are not in a condition to absorb and assimilate, or to utilize effectively, the higher learning of the books, and it is unwise to promote an un-practical at the expense of an obviously practical system of teaching. Moreover, unlike the Caucasian, the average Indian hates new things on the mere ground of their novelty, and resists obstinately all attempts from outside to change his condition; while, unlike the negro and some other colored types, he has no strain of the imitative in his nature, and never aspires from within to be a white man. Whatever you do for him in the line of improvement you have, as a rule, to press upon him by endless patience and tact a.nd by a multi-tude of persuasive devices; and I insist that it is foolish to force upon an Indian those studies which have no relation t,o his environ-ment and which he can not turn to account, as long as there is so much of a simpler sort which he is capable of learning and which he actually must know in order to make his way in the world. A second critic will doubtless air his fears as to what will become of the Indian's land and money under this " wide-open" policy. To such an one I would respond : "What is to become of the land or the money that you are going to leave to your children, or I to mine? Will they be any better able to take care of it for having been always kept without experience in handling property of any kind? " Swin-dlers will unquestionably lay snares for the weakest and most igno-. rant Indians, just as they do for the corresponding class of wh,ites. We are guarding the Indian temporarily against his own follies in land transactions by holding his allotment in trust for him for twenty years or more unless he sooner satisfies us of his business capacity. Something of the same sort will be done with respect to the principal of his money. In spite of all our care, however, after we have taken our hands off he may fall a victim to sharp practices; but the man never lived-red, white, or any other color-who did not learn a more valuable lesson from one hard blow than from twenty warnings. A great deal has been said and written about the " racial tendency " of the Indian to squander whatever comes into his hands.' This is no more "racial " than his tendency to eat and drink to excess or to pre-fer pleasure to work: it is simply the assertion of a primitive instinct common to all mankind in the lower stages of social development. What we call thrift is nothing hut the forecasting sense which recog-nizes the probability of a to-morrow; the 'dea of a to-morrow is the boundary between barbarisin and civilization, and the only way |