“How many?  And how many are lawyers and doctors and engineers and ministers of the gospel?  And how many can truthfully be said to be ‘educated men in all walks of life’?  A mere handful!  Where one succeeds, a hundred fail!  And the others return to their reservation, dissolute, dissatisfied, to live on the bounty of your government; you, yourself, will admit that when an Indian does rise into a profession for which his education has fitted him, he is an object of wonder—­a man to be written about in your newspapers and talked about in your homes.  And then your sentimentalists—­your fools—­hold him up as a type!  Not your educated Indians are reaping the benefit of your government’s belated attention, but those who are following the calling for which nature has fitted them—­stock-raising and small farming on their allotted reservations.  The educated ones know that the government will feed and clothe them—­why should they exert themselves?

“Here in the North, because the Indians have been dealt with sanely, and not herded onto restricted reservations, and subjected to the experiments of departmental fools well-intentioned—­and otherwise—­they are infinitely better off.  They are free to roam the woods, to hunt and to trap and to fish, and they are contented.  They remain at the posts only long enough to do their trading, and return again to the wilds.  For the most part they are truthful and sober and honest.  They can obtain sufficient clothing and enough to eat.  The lakes and the rivers teem with fish, and the woods and the barrens abound with game,

“Contrast these with the Indians who have come more intimately into contact with the whites.  You can see them hanging about the depots and the grogeries and rum shops of the railway towns, degenerate, diseased, reduced to beggary and petty thievery.  And you do not have to go to the railway towns to see the effect of your civilization upon them.  Follow the great trade rivers!  From source to mouth, their banks are lined with the Indians who have come into contact with your civilization!

“Go to any mission centre!  Do you find that the Indian has taken kindly to the doctrines it teaches?  Do you find them happy, God-fearing Indians who embraced Christianity and are living in accord with its precepts?  You do not!  Except in a very few isolated cases, like your lawyers and doctors of the states, you will find at the very gates of the missions, be their denomination what they may, debauchery and rascality in its most vicious forms.  Read your answer there in the vice-marked, ragged, emaciated hangers-on of the missions.