sugar stolen from him.  He poisoned the sugar next night and left his door open.  In the morning six Indians were found dead outside the town.  That was a cute notion, I guess; and yet there are other examples worse than that, but they are too revolting to tell.  Never mind; I suppose they have found record somewhere else if not in this world, and in one shape or another they will speak in due time.  The Crees are perhaps the only tribe of prairie Indians who have as yet suffered no injustice at the hands of the white man.  The land is still theirs, the hunting-rounds remain almost undisturbed; but their days are numbered, and already the echo of the approaching wave of Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree country.

It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  First the White man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor; then the greedy hunter, the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison; then the settler and exterminator—­every where it has been the same story.

This wild man who first welcomed the new-comer is the only perfect socialist or communist in the world.  He holds all things in common with his tribe—­the land, the bison, the river, and the moose.  He is starving, and the rest of the tribe want food.  Well, he kills a moose, and to the last bit the coveted food is shared by all.  That war-party has taken one hundred horses in the last raid into Blackfoot or Peagin territory; well, the whole tribe are free to help themselves to the best and fleetest steeds before the captors will touch one out of the band.  There is but a scrap of beaver, a thin rabbit, or a bit of sturgeon in the lodge; a stranger comes, and he is hungry; give him his share and let him be first served and best attended to.  If one child starves in an Indian camp you may know that in every lodge scarcity is universal and that every stomach is hungry.  Poor, poor fellow! his virtues are all his own; crimes he may have, and plenty, but his noble traits spring from no book-learning, from no school-craft, from the preaching of no pulpit; they come from the instinct of good which the Great Spirit has taught him; they are the whisperings from that lost world whose glorious shores beyond the Mountains of the Setting Sun are the long dream of his life.  The most curious anomaly among the race of man, the red man of America, is passing away beneath our eyes into the infinite solitude.  The possession of the same noble qualities which we affect to reverence among our nations makes us kill him.  If he would be as the African or the Asiatic it would be all right for him; if he would be our slave he might live, but as he won’t be that, won’t toil and delve and hew for us, and will persist in hunting, fishing, and roaming over the beautiful prairie land which the Great Spirit gave him; in a word, since he will be free we kill him.  Why do I call this wild child the great anomaly of the human race?  I will tell you.  Alone amongst savage tribes he has learnt