a congregation of several hundreds awaiting his ministrations, the land was recently purchased from white men, by the United States Indian Commission, as a new home for the evicted Palatingwa Indians of Warner’s Ranch.  These latter Indians, in recent interviews with me, have pertinently asked:  “Where did the white men get this land, so they could sell it to the government for us?  Indians lived here many centuries before a white man had ever seen the ‘land of the sundown sea.’  When the ‘long-gowns’ first came here, there were many Indians at Pala.  Now they are all gone.  Where?  And how do we know that before long we shall not be driven out, and be gone, as they were driven out and are gone?”

At San Luis Rey and San Diego, there are a few scattered families, but very few, and most of these have fled far back into the desert, or to the high mountains, as far as possible out of reach of the civilization that demoralizes and exterminates them.

A few scattered remnants are all that remain.

Let us seek for the real reason why.

The system of the padres was patriarchal, paternal.  Certain it is that the Indians were largely treated as if they were children.  No one questions or denies this statement.  Few question that the Indians were happy under this system, and all will concede that they made wonderful progress in the so-called arts of civilization.  From crude savagery they were lifted by the training of the fathers into usefulness and productiveness.  They retained their health, vigor, and virility.  They were, by necessity perhaps, but still undeniably, chaste, virtuous, temperate, honest, and reasonably truthful.  They were good fathers and mothers, obedient sons and daughters, amenable to authority, and respectful to the counsels of old age.

All this and more may unreservedly be said for the Indians while they were under the control of the fathers.  That there were occasionally individual cases of harsh treatment is possible.  The most loving and indulgent parents are now and again ill-tempered, fretful, or nervous.  The fathers were men subject to all the limitations of other men.  Granting these limitations and making due allowance for human imperfection, the rule of the fathers must still be admired for its wisdom and commended for its immediate results.

Now comes the order of secularization, and a little later the domination of the Americans.  Those opposed to the control of the fathers are to set the Indians free.  They are to be “removed from under the irksome restraint of cold-blooded priests who have held them in bondage not far removed from slavery"!!  They are to have unrestrained liberty, the broadest and fullest intercourse with the great American people, the white, Caucasian American, not the dark-skinned Mexican!!!

What was the result.  Let an eye-witness testify: