27th. Fiscal—­Something has been out of kelter at Washington these two years with regard to the rigid application of appropriations, at least in the Indian Department.  We have been literally without money, and issuing paper to public creditors and employees.  Surely a government that collects its own revenues should never want funds to pay its agents and officers.

Mr. Trowbridge writes:  “The money pressure is nearly or quite over in New York, but we feel it here in a dreadful degree.  The want of public disbursements this year, upon which we have always rested our hopes with so much confidence, added to the over-introduction of goods for a year or two past, has produced this state of things, and I sometimes think that there will be no great improvement in this generation.”

29th. Medical Causes of Depopulation.—­The causes of Indian depopulation are wars, the want of abundance of food, intemperance, and idleness.  Dr. Pitcher, in a letter of this date, says:  “In your note (to ‘Sanillac’) on the subject of the diminution in numbers of our aboriginal neighbors, you have seized upon the most conspicuous, and, during their continuance, the most fatal causes of their decline.  With the small-pox you might, however, associate the measles, which, in consequence of their manner of treating the fever preceding the eruption, viz., the use of vapor and cold baths combined, most commonly tends to a mortal termination.  To these two evils, propagated by the diffusion of a specific virus, may be added the prevalence of general epidemics, such as influenza, &c., whose virulence expends its force without restraint upon the Indians.  They are not (as you are aware) a people who draw much instruction from the school of experience, particularly in the department of medicine, and, when by the side of this fact you place the protean forms which the diseases of epidemic seasons assume, the inference must follow that multitudes of them perish where the civilized man would escape (of which I could furnish examples).

“It is the province of the science of medicine to preserve to society its feeble and invalid members, which, notwithstanding the war it wages upon the principle of political economists, augments considerably the sum of human life.  The victims of the diseases of civilization do not balance the casualties, &c. of a ruder state of society, as may be seen by inspecting the tables of the rates of mortality for a century past.

“I will suggest to you the propriety of improving this opportunity for setting the public right on one point, and that is the effects of aboriginal manners upon the physical character.  For my part, I have long since ceased to believe that they are indebted to their mode of life for the vigor, as a race, which they exhibit, but that the naturally feeble are destroyed by the vicissitudes to which they are exposed, and which, in part, gives them an appearance, hardy and athletic, above their civilized neighbors.”