18th.  Received the Senate’s printed document, No. 1, containing the President’s annual message and all the Secretaries’ reports.  The Commissioner of Indian Affairs recommends the abolition of sub-agencies, and the raising of the pay of interpreters—­two measures recommended in my annual report.  The department is very much in the hands of ignorant and immoral interpreters, who frequently misconceive the point to be interpreted.  Could we raise up a set of educated and moral men for this duty, the department would stand on high grounds.  Surely, a sort of normal institute could teach the principles of the Indian grammar, as well as the Greek.  There is no sound without a meaning, and no meaning conveyed without an orthographical rule.  They do not gabble at random, as some think.  Their modes of utterance are, it is true, often defective, but they are not without grammatical laws, I inquired into this matter at my first entrance into the Indian country of the Algonquins, sixteen years ago.  I found that verbs had eight classes of conjugations, and ten including the broad vowels; five declensions of nouns, and two sets of pronouns, one to be placed before and the other at the end of the verb and substantive.  That all substantives could be changed into verbs; that there were a stock of adjective and prepositional participles, and that the mode of forming compounds and derivatives was varied, but all subject to the most exact rules.  They have a very accurate appreciation of sound and its varied meanings, and are pushed to use figures to help out or illustrate a meaning; but the excessive refinements of syntax, for which some contend, are theories in the minds of unpracticed collaborators.

18th.  I wrote to Mr. Palfrey, E.N.A.R., declining to review Stone’s “Brant,” and apprizing him of the preparation of an article on the “North-west,” by Mr. I. Lanman.  “I take this occasion to say that I have received the proof-sheets of some hundred and fifty pages of Col.  Stone’s Life of Brant.  It is a work somewhat discursive, and involves some critical points in Indian history and customs.  I should not feel willing to commence a notice of it, without having the whole before me.  The hero of the work hardly exerts influence enough on the revolutionary contest to justify the attempt of piling on him so much of the materials of that momentous contest, and I think, moreover, there is a perceptible attempt made to whitewash a man who lived and died with no slight nor undeserved opprobrium.”

19th.  Hendrick Apaumut, a Mohegan chief, of Wisconsin, applied for aid, in money, to facilitate his journey to Washington.  What the Indians lack, in their business affairs, is system and method; foresight to plan, and stability to carry into effect.

Received a copy of the message of the President, communicating the thrilling circumstances of the recent massacre on board of the ill-fated steamer “Caroline,” and the gross outrage of national rights committed by the burning of that boat and the destruction of her crew.  Palliatives for the act will undoubtedly be plead; but the act itself will probably make a hero, in the estimation of his countrymen, of Mr. McNab, if it does nothing more.