“delicacy of sentiment bears no sort of constant relation to culture.  Every man ... can name among his acquaintances men of unusual culture who are coarse voluptuaries and others of the humblest education who have the delicacy of a refined woman.  So it is with families, and so it is with tribes.”

Is it?  That is the point to be proved.  I myself have pointed out that among nations, as among individuals, intellectual culture alone does not insure a capacity for true love, because that also implies emotional and esthetic culture.  Now in our civilized communities there are all sorts of individuals, many coarse, a few refined, while some civilized races, too, are more refined than others.  To prove his point Dr. Brinton would have had to show that among the Indians, too, there are tribes and individuals who are morally and esthetically refined; and this he failed to do; wherefore his argument is futile.  Diligent and patient search has not revealed to me a single exception to the rule of depravity above described, though I admit the possibility that among the Indians who have been for generations under missionary control such exceptions might be found.  But we are here considering the wild Indian and not the missionary’s garden plant.

SQUAWS AND PERSONAL BEAUTY

An excellent test of the Indian’s capacity for refined amorous feeling may be found in his attitude toward personal beauty.  Does he admire real beauty, and does it decide his choice of a mate?  That there are good-looking girls among some Indian tribes cannot be denied, though they are exceptional.  Among the thousands of squaws I have seen on the Pacific Slope, from Mexico to Alaska, I can recall only one whom I could call really beautiful.  She was a pupil at a Sitka Indian school, spoke English well, and I suspect had some white blood in her.  Joaquin Miller, who married a Modoc girl and is given to romancing and idealizing, relates (227) how “the brown-eyed girls danced, gay and beautiful, half-nude, in their rich black hair and flowing robes.”  Herbert Walsh,[208] speaking of the girls at a Navajo Indian school, writes that

“among them was one little girl of striking beauty, with fine, dark eyes, regularly and delicately modelled features, and a most winning expression.  Nothing could be more attractive than the unconscious grace of this child of nature.”

I can find no indication, however, that the Indians ever admire such exceptional beauty, and plenty of evidence that what they admire is not beautiful.  “These Indians are far from being connoisseurs in beauty,” wrote Mrs. Eastman (105) of the Dakotas.  Dobrizhoffer says of the Abipones (II., 139) what we read in Schoolcraft concerning the Creeks:  “Beauty is of no estimation in either sex;” and I have also previously quoted Belden’s testimony (302), that the men select the squaws not for their personal beauty but “their strength and ability