Part 9

Yet I have seen and heard of agencies where, notwithstanding gratuities, there has been steady improvement in houses, crops and herds. Good management on the one hand and the good sense of the better class of Indians on the other hand, at certain points led to remarkable results; but a forward move along the whole line of the Indian population is not to be looked for till they shall have the same motives to industry that other men have and that all men need. Agencies, reservations and rationing are and long will be a necessity, lessening only as by wise use of public bounty, and by proper legislation and care, the Indians shall approach self-support and citizenship. The persistently indolent should not remain as they are now, unless the nation has pledged itself, by solemn treaty, to feed forever the savage who squats on his haunches and refuses to work.

First-class men, and no others, can settle the Indian question. The want of them is the bottom fact in our Indian troubles. Government pays the market price for good beef and sugar and tobacco, but will not pay for good men. There is only one answer to the question, “Can a superior man afford to be an Indian agent?” No! There are excellent Indian agents, thanks to their noble impulses, but Government should buy and not beg what it is bound to get. Salaries are from $900 to $2,200, depending principally upon the number of Indians under the agent’s care. Hence, the more liberally he feeds, the more the roving bands of the plains seek his care and swell his income. Pressing self-support upon them may scatter them and lessen his salary.

Congress will appropriate hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed Indians, millions to fight them, but will not give the nominal additional sum necessary to induce men who can make a living in any other way to become Indian agents. We tell the Indians to take the white man’s road and refuse to open it. He needs ideas; he is capable of citizenship, but is unfit to hold lands or manage property till he can read and write, and knows something of our language.

Of the forty thousand wild children of the plains who are looking to the nation for education, not over eight thousand are enrolled at school. The average is far less. We are rich and paying all our debts but those to the illiterate of the land, whose ignorance is not their fault. The little children will one day lead. Honor and interest demand a care for their welfare. The point of sending children to Carlisle and Hampton should not be that they may learn trades so much as to acquire our language and habits, and see and comprehend civilization—a temporary sojourn away from their people, that all interested in them declare to be most desirable. Settling Indians on homesteads, encouraging mechanic arts, agriculture, and especially cattle-raising, for which this race is peculiarly adapted, and has, at the beginning, in its fitness for it, an advantage over white men, turns more than anything else on the wisdom, skill and perseverance of the agent.

It should be said that there has been for the past ten years a steady improvement in the morals of the agencies, the ideas and habits of Indians, and in the character and efficiency of Government employees. The chief who once said, “We can’t eat schools and teachers, and don’t want them,” and afterward sent his son to Hampton, illustrates the change in Indian thought that is steadily going on. Progressive Indians have suffered persecutions. To abandon the dance, put away wild costumes, and rub the paint off his face, has cost many an Indian suffering and loss. The “white man way” is not even more fashionable or comfortable, ridicule being one penalty, which, to an Indian is hard to bear.

The quiet missionary work done for the red race during the past forty years is the seed sowing, of which it and the nation will reap a harvest of good results. The Indian is a worshiper; “the blue sky and high bluffs are their church edifice, the medicine man being their minister.” With selfishness and vindictiveness running through their religion, it contains a recognition of one God, a Spirit which may be readily expounded by Christian teaching into an adequate conception of the true God. No heathen in the world offer so little to obstruct and so much to encourage the work of the missionary. Four years’ experience at Hampton has shown them to be remarkably open to truth, and not to be in any marked degree revengeful. They are like other people, their special weakness being physical. Christians of America have a duty to the Indian that they have not done. Their work in the West should be doubled at once. United effort by the great religious societies would do much for the welfare of this race, through persistent pressure upon Congress for a proper legal status.

In citizenship is the salvation of the Indian; wardship tends to emasculate him. The effect of the ballot would be to make a man of him as it did of the negro. To be brought out of his present condition into fitness to vote is a work of the utmost delicacy and difficulty, but it can be done. They are not dying out—at any rate, the 50,000 Sioux are not. Twenty-eight Sioux Indian youth, who had spent three years at Hampton, have just been returned to their Dakota home. Of these young men six are farmers and assist in general work, getting from fifteen to twenty dollars per month; two are employed in offices at the same wages; six are teachers, getting twenty dollars a month; two are blacksmiths, two are shoemakers, and seven are carpenters, getting a dollar a day apiece; all have rations besides. All refused to go to camp life, and have been provided by the Government agents with separate buildings, which they have cleaned and fitted up as best they could. The Indian Department has seconded their efforts very heartily. The next twelve months will decide their success. Their course will be watched with interest, as a test of the methods at Carlisle and Hampton schools, and indeed of the Indian’s ability to make good use of our education.

The “General Survey” for the year suggests suitable accommodations for Indians in some other of our institutions. This would be wise. The 370 negro youth at Hampton are a wonderful help to their 90 Indian schoolmates both directly and indirectly. The mingling of the races has proved a success, reacting happily on both. Increase the good work of your institutions and they will grow in favor with God and man.

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FROM ADDRESS OF CAPT. R. H. PRATT.

Last summer, at Carlisle, during the vacation period, we put out in good families among the farmers, 109 of our children. They all came back (except 29 who are to stay during the winter) immensely advantaged by it, speaking better English, with the Indian diffidence rooted out to a degree that it would have been impossible for us to have accomplished in the same time even at Carlisle, which, from its advantages of contact with civilization, is immensely superior to any agency school. But we went farther. We found that the boys and girls had made such good impressions among the citizens that many desired them to stay, and so the Department was asked to allow a few to remain out for the winter, and go to the public schools with the white children and live in families. The Department gave its consent provided it would cost nothing. So arrangements were made, and we have out for this winter six girls and twenty-three boys.

To make the completest success of Eastern education for the Indians, I would use Carlisle as a sort of cleanser, a bath-tub or something of that kind, where we could wash them, clean them up, get a little understanding of our ways into them, and some understanding of English, and then scatter them out over the country to come in contact with our life. In that way they would learn best how to become citizens of the United States.

But we can rest it here. Whenever Congress gets ready to educate the Indian children as a whole, it will be no difficult matter to determine upon the best methods. Three to five thousand scattered around through the East would still leave forty-five to forty-seven thousand for the agency schools to work upon. That number in schools through the East, just as your Association proposes, sending them into your mission schools, where they may learn right from our life by comparison with theirs, by daily contact, will be found to be the most rapid plan. Make them work, and do not forget to make them fill their places, which they will gladly do when they find they must.

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THE CHINESE.

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REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

Although in the Report of your Committee very brief mention is made of the work among the Chinese of this country, it is not therefore to be inferred that that work is being neglected, nor that it is failing in the ends for which it was undertaken. Rather is there a deepened conviction of its importance and increased encouragement in the prosecution of it; but in estimating the importance of the work we are not to consider alone the Chinese in this country, though they are a body of men of sufficient number to call for all, and more than all, that has been done for them. But we look beyond the 75,000 Chinese in California to the 400,000,000 in their own land. The Christian world through their missionaries, and by personal intercourse, are coming to understand this people better than they once did. Instead of the race of barbarians, stupid and immovable, which they were once thought to be, those who are well-informed accept the assertion of the Rev. John Ross, who says, “They are beyond comparison the most intelligent of non-Christian peoples; if any race surpasses them in industry, it is only the Anglo-Saxon.” * * * * *

But how is the Christian church to have a part in remodeling the institutions and customs of that vast nation? Not by any one method alone, but one of those which Providence has opened, is doubtless to be through the agency of Chinamen converted here and returning to their homes to preach the Gospel to their countrymen. It cannot be questioned that there will be a place and need for those trained under the institutions of the Gospel to go to China and plant the same institutions there; yet the converted Chinamen can do some things and exert an influence in some directions not open to others.

The career of Yung Wing furnishes a striking illustration of this. Of humble parentage, converted while at school in this country, he conceived the plan of bringing Chinese youth of promise to this country to be educated. He returned to China in 1855, without money, without influential friends, having almost forgotten his own language. For sixteen years he studied, taught, served the government, worked his way upward, and won to his views officers high in authority. In 1871 his plan was adopted by the government, $1,500,000 placed at his disposal, and more than 100 selected Chinese youth were brought to this country. Though his experiment has now received a check, and perhaps will not be carried on further, even its success so far is a standing proof of influence exerted by a Christianized native such as no other could hope to exert. And not only so, it has by no means been a failure even in itself considered. The young men who have gone back to China from our colleges and schools and Christian families have gone back far other than they came.

It is even a question whether they may not be more to be feared by the Chinese government as revolutionists than as though they had returned thoroughly converted Christians. But all will have received new ideas. Even those who have been chased through the streets by the hoodlums of San Francisco have learned some new ideas. They can distinguish between a Christian and a politician and know who are their friends and what makes them so.

If in a generation we could send back to China a score of Yung Wings we should do more for the conversion of China than by any other method open to us.

The Report speaks of a plan for establishing a new mission in Southern China as being under consideration. To your Committee it would seem the part of wisdom to move slowly in this matter so long as the present facilities are offered for labor in this country, especially as it is uncertain how long these facilities may continue to be enjoyed.

Thirty different Mission Boards are already occupying points in China, and though their 1200 laborers are wholly inadequate for the work of evangelizing China, yet they furnish in their various stations, points from which laborers may go out, so that the call would seem to be for men to recruit the missions already established, rather than for forming new ones. Especially will a separate movement of this kind be unnecessary if the converted Chinese of this country are able to carry out their purpose of establishing a mission of their own in the country back of Canton. The very fact that they are entertaining such an idea, and earnestly pressing it, speaks volumes for the work which this Society has already accomplished, and opens a glorious vista for its ever expanding career in the future.

Your Committee would propose the following resolution:

_Resolved_, That in view of the small demands made upon the treasury of the A. M. A. by the work among the Chinese, and the great returns which that work promises, the constituency of this Society are under the most solemn obligations to furnish for this branch of its work all the means that can be employed consistently with a wise economy and with due regard for the encouragement of self-help by the converted Chinese themselves.—_Rev. A. E. P. Perkins, Chairman._

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THE CHINESE TO EVANGELIZE CHINA.

BY REV. C. H. POPE

Great good has been done in China by missionaries, but against what odds! Now in the free United States, the country whose government has been his nation’s _most_ generous friend, and whose people have shown him most personal attention, the Chinaman can examine Christians with a criticism no less keen, but far surer to be correct. He has had no difficulty in seeing the difference between a “hoodlum” and a Sunday-school teacher. He has even been able to distinguish one reverend from another, and neither trusted “brother” Kalloch nor distrusted “brother” Pond. The international lesson he here learns as he could not at his home—that a line between the children of light and the children of darkness runs through many families, through all communities.

Now let him go back to China, _if he must—that is, if he will!_ He goes tenfold more potent than any of us to find the way to his countrymen’s hearts. I once doubted Chinese interpreters of our teaching and preaching. On examination I came to believe that the English language is the best medium for us to tell the Gospel in—a language born of Christian civilization, enlarged by Christian teaching, ornamented by Christian poetry, matured by the translation of the Bible, developed in Christian education, carrying in its common phrases less of grossness or corruption, and more of plain goodness, than any other tongue. In the day and evening schools, and in the Sunday-schools and prayer meetings which this Association maintains, the Chinese interpreter plays a prominent part only for a short time. Soon he becomes little needed; the pupils rapidly gain knowledge of our words: from step to step they catch gleams of new ideas and find new words not numerous in comparison with their language, but wonderfully clear and helpful. Daily observation is their best interpreter; the winning tones of ladies and children gain their ear and reach their perception easily; they get broad, practical ideas of Christianity; and they can be trusted to preach the Gospel in Chinese to Chinese. No process has ever gone so healthfully and hopefully into the Mongolian heart.

We are not concerned to explain the presence of any race in our land, nor can we parley over the motives which brought them to it. Enough for us to see that these Sauls of Tarsus come into the “straight” way before they _leave_ Damascus; and that when their eyes have been opened, and our forgiving Saviour has accepted them, we call them “brethren,” and kindly protect them from enemies. Enough for us to train them in all Christian truth and service, until they and we together get an adequate notion of the part they are fitted to take in their nation’s conversion. Then, unless our sister society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, shall take them into the far-off field for that grand work, we must formally equip and send them; for the Holy Ghost has said, “Separate me Paul and Barnabas for the work whereunto I have called them.”

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REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON FINANCE.

Your Committee on Finance beg leave to report that they have examined the accounts and have found them duly audited. Attached to the auditor’s report there is a statement that all the funds which represent permanent property of the Society have also been examined, and everything is found in order. There is a balance in the treasury, Sept. 30th, 1881, of $518.80. The management asked last year for an increase of 25 per cent. in the contributions; the churches gave them an increase of 30 per cent. During the year there have been large improvements made, and some enlargements of the different educational institutions, so that they are now able to accommodate a much greater number of students than before; and if that opportunity is to be embraced, and these students who are clamoring for an education are to be instructed, it will require a larger outlay of money than that of the preceding year.

On the basis of the heartiness with which the churches complied with the request of last year, your Committee recommend that the management ask of the churches this year a little more still; and that, as against the $246,000 last year, the endeavor shall be made to raise $300,000 the present year.

The Committee desire reference to be made to some departments of the work where the need is special, notably the Chinese work, where there is ample room for a hundred-fold more of service. The Indian work also claims a special contribution, and the work among the Africans is always enlarging more and more.

I am requested to call attention also, in this informal way, to two provisions of the by-laws, that you may understand how financially secure this Society is, and how well-nigh impossible it is that there should, in any event, be any loss of its funds, or that they should be diverted from the use to which they are devoted.

On the sixth page of the report, concerning the Committee on Finance, it says:

It shall be the duty of the Committee on Finance to examine the accounts of the Treasurer for the month preceding each regular meeting of the Executive Committee, before such meeting, taking the books of account kept by him, and comparing them with his statement of the month’s receipts and disbursements and with the vouchers, and to certify to the correctness of such statement when approved by them. They shall also cause to be kept a book, wherein shall be set forth in detail, (1,) all stocks and bonds owned by the Association at par, with a note of the original cost of the same to the Association; (2,) all real estate (both land and buildings) and other property of the Association, with the full cost of the same; and (3,) all property held on special deposit or in trust. This book shall be at all times open to the inspection of the members of the Executive Committee, and the record shall be so added to and amended, from time to time, under the direction of the Finance Committee, as to show at all times a correct statement of the property of the Association, and of any special trusts in its hands.

The Committee desire to say on this point that they doubt whether any other benevolent organization can show a more careful guarding of the munificence of the churches; and on the basis of increased want and of larger opportunities and perfect safety, they ask that the churches this year put into the hands of the management the sum of $300,000.—_E. S. Atwood, Chairman._

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FROM THE ADDRESS OF REV. GEO. F. STANTON.

* * * It seems to me, sir, that, looking back over the days that we have been gathered here, we have been lifted up, and I seem to see to-day the prophecy of a grand increase and acquisition of interest and helpfulness for this work. We have been inspired by these grand addresses; we have been thrilled by them; we have been, as it were, lifted above our ordinary thought and feeling; and the work stretches before us in grand and inspiring invitations. But what, sir, shall be the return we are to make for all we have here enjoyed? What is to be the result of all this inspiration and uplifting? What is to be the outcome of this anniversary? If we are to go away simply rejoicing that we have been so richly blessed in this fellowship and instruction, if we are to go away feeling simply glad and grateful, have we met the claims of the hour?

I remember the story of a brother in the African Methodist church, who, whenever the contribution box was passed, was accustomed to shut his eyes and throw his head back and join in with all his zeal and all his lungs in singing the song which was usually sung on that occasion, “Fly abroad, thou mighty Gospel.” This went on for several contributions, and then the deacon who passed the box thought he detected an error in all that praising and singing, and so he punched the brother quite pointedly with the box and said, “Just you give something to make it fly!” If we merely have the inspiration of this hour and it does not culminate in enlarged gifts for the work, if there is not a vast enlargement of the work upon the hands of this Association, this meeting will have been a failure. It is to redeem it from that failure that this report and these calls are now made.

You remember how it was when the war closed—you remember what an inspiration swept over the land, and what enthusiasm there was at the very mention of the freed slave. You remember how many associations and philanthropic societies, and even the Government itself, were enlisted in the work, and how their appeals thrilled the multitudes. The picture held before us then was that of a slave, from whose cramped limbs the broken manacles were falling. We were enthusiastic then. But to-day the same picture of the freed and suffering slave, and the same appeals, though with all the worth they had in them then, are to us only the embellishments of rhetoric. They have lost their force, and I am surprised at this when I look upon the vastness of the work; for, with all these years of our labor, the work has outgrown and overmatched our efforts, and the demands upon us to-day are greater than at the first. Every appeal made to justice then is as strong to-day; every appeal made to philanthropy then is of equal force to-day; every appeal to our enthusiasm then has in it just as much of power, even if it is not felt, to-day.

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VOTE OF THANKS.