July 14th.  WHISKY AMONG THE INDIANS.—­Mr. Robert Stuart, Agent to the American Fur Company, writes from Mackinac, that some of the American Fur Company’s clerks are not inclined to take whisky, under the general government permit, provided their opponents take none.  This tampering with the subject and with me, in the conduct of the agent of that company, whose duty it is rigidly to exclude the article by every means, would accord better, it should seem, with the spirit of one who had not recently taken obligations which are applicable to all times and all space.  Little does the spirit of commerce care how many Indians die inebriates, if it can be assured of beaver skins.  The situation of any of its agents, who may acknowledge Christian obligations, is doubtless an embarrassing one; and such persons should seek to get out of such an employment as soon as possible.  The true direction, in all cases of this kind, is, to take high moral grounds.  The department, by granting such permits, violates a law.  The agent of the company who seeks to exclude “opponents” in the trade, errs by attempting to throw the responsibility of the minor question upon the local agent, over whose head he already shakes his permits from a superior power.  Now the “opponents,” be it understood, have no such “permits,” and the agent can give them none.

This subject of ardent spirits is a constantly recurring one in every possible form; and no little time of an agent of Indian affairs, and no small part of his troubles and vexations, are due to it.  The traders and citizens generally, on the frontiers, are leagued in their supposed interests to break down, or evade the laws, Congressional and territorial, which exclude it, or make it an offence to sell or give it.  If an agent aims honestly to put the law in force, he must expect to encounter obloquy.  If he appeals to the local courts, it is ten to one that nine-tenths of his jury are offenders in this very thing.  So far as the American Fur Company is concerned, it is seen, I think, by the course of the managers, that it would conduce to better hunts if the Indians were kept sober, and liquor were rigidly excluded; but the argument is, that “on the lines”—­that the Hudson’s Bay Company use it, and that their trade would suffer if they had not “some.”  And they thus override the agents, by appealing to higher powers, and so get permits annually, for a limited quantity, of which they and not the agents are the judges.  In this way the independence of the agents is constantly kept down, and made to bend to a species of mock popular will.