16th.  In a letter of this date, Dr. Greene, Sec. of the A.B.C., for F. Missions, adverts to the positions heretofore taken, by that board, respecting the missionary establishment at Mackinack.  The moral position of that Board, with respect to that Mission, appears to me to be wrong.  This mission involves the mission cause, in some important respects, with the entire question of missionary operations over the North-west—­reaching from lat. 42 deg. to 49 deg., with many degrees of longitude; for, from all this region, the Indian boys and girls of the mission have been collected.  It began operations with them, I think, in 1822; and having, in this interval, expended many thousand dollars, and erected expensive buildings, it now drops the thing, just at the point when the Indians have commenced important cessions, and when their condition is such that they are not only inclined to receive interior teachers and evangelists, which have been raised at that central point, but, by these cessions to the government, they have provided funds for schools and teachers.

Merely because the excellent superintendent determined, two or three years ago, to leave this important point and enter into secular business, to provide for a growing family; and because the attraction of foreign fields carries young clergymen abroad, to the detriment of the home field, it does not, I think, fulfil the highest requisitions of duty to abandon the field, and thereby to leave it to be said that the Board doubts God’s purposes with regard to the red man.  If the missionary himself, who has so many years conducted the concern with approbation, was not willing to trust his rewards to a higher power, but aimed, as it were, to steady himself by stretching forth his hand, it seems to me the race ought not to be the sufferers for such a course.  They constitute a vastly more appropriate field of labor than the “millions of foreign lands,” who sit, to a large extent, unaffected by the Gospel.  Not, indeed, that those fields should be neglected; but the Indian race, and these large families of it, are worthy of a warmer sympathy than I can see in Dr. Greene’s letters, or the decisions of the Board by whom he is governed.

20th.  Signed a supplementary treaty with the Saginaws at Flint.  By this treaty the Saginaws relinquish their reserves in this valuable and rapidly settling portion of the country, and agree to accept a location on the head waters of the Osage, which their chiefs, have explored.  They are to occupy two of their reservations on the west shores of Saginaw Bay, for five years.  The government is to pay them the entire proceeds of the land, as sold in the public land offices.  They set apart funds for schools, and to pay their debts.  This tribe has now no instructors.  They have the reputation of being turbulent, and averse to all plans of improvement.  Their history is fraught with deeds of violence.  They made bloody inroads on the settlements of Western