Part 5

Second. We heartily approve of its plan to combine an industrial with a literary education, that the boys and girls may take the lead in Christian arts as in Christian culture. Yet the experiment of training them in schools far from home should be carefully watched, lest there be formed a gulf of separation between the tribe and its educated youth, a gulf so deep that those returning from Hampton shall, through social longings, lapse into the customs of their fathers, or else shall stand aloof from their people in cultured isolation. We should subordinate individual advancement to tribal advantage; the benefit of the few to that of the many; and for this purpose schools are being established nearer home. Hence we recommend the careful study of the results of the experiment.

Third. We would earnestly press the evangelistic work among the Indians. They are to stay with us. They are soon to be of us, citizens with us of this Republic. So much is written in the providence of God. To educate them is not enough. The federal government is increasingly engaged in this. But its Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Hon. H. Price, in his forthcoming report says: “Civilization is a plant of exceeding slow growth unless supplemented by Christian teaching and influence.” “In no other manner and by no other means, in my judgment, can our Indian population be so speedily and permanently reclaimed from barbarism, idolatry, and savage life as by the educational and missionary operations of the Christian people of our country.” Christianized education is the watchword, the vitalizing of all the truth of God with the love and spirit of God. This means more than schools; it means Christian schools and Christian churches. For this very work this Association has been ordained of God, and it should enlarge its work to the demands of the hour. The proposed exchange with the American Board means, for this society, enlargement. The rapid progress of the Indian towards citizenship demands enlargement. God calls this Association to enlarge its Indian missions that it may prepare both the negro and the Indian for citizenship and God.

Fourth. We believe that the welfare of the Indian demands the abolition of both tribal and reservation relations, the allotment of their lands in severalty, their amenability to State and federal laws and courts. And while we recognize with gratitude the past attempts of our national government in these directions, we need to press upon Congress the duty of renewing its endeavors and enlarging its appropriations for schools, that it may speedily turn these wards into industrious citizens. And for this end we would recommend that a committee of nine be appointed by this Association to memorialize Congress to place the Indian by the side of the negro and other citizens in the right to buy, own, and sell property, real and personal, to work at what he pleases, and live where he pleases, to have the same standing before the law, to vote and hold office, in short to possess all the rights and obligations of citizens of the Republic.

A. H. ROSS, _Chairman_.

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WORK AND DUTY IN THE EAST.

BY GEN. S. C. ARMSTRONG.

At Hampton there are ninety, and at Carlisle there are nearly three hundred Indians—boys and girls—who are learning civilization as an object lesson, and are themselves an object lesson to the centres of intelligence and wealth, where is the sentiment that inspires and the means that provide for the combined practical and spiritual teaching of the red man. They suffice, perhaps, for a tangible proof of the Indian’s capacity, of which the need was great; their effect upon public sentiment has been marked. The result with these Indians has, so far, proved satisfactory. Scattering these pupils among the farmers of Massachusetts and of Pennsylvania for a portion of the year, has had such a good effect mutually, that five hundred more might well be so placed in various States, under the care of special agents, with proper rendezvous where the sick or unsatisfactory might be kept with a view to returning home, say ten per cent, of the entire number.

The Negro institutions at Nashville, Tenn., at Talladega, Alabama, and elsewhere, could do excellent work for them. The aims and methods of most white schools render them unfit for Indians.

We have found the weak point of the race to be physical, not mental or moral. They can endure the hardships peculiar to the plains, but not steady work from day to day. They are tainted with inherited disease; the lungs are their weak point. They are sinewy but not muscular; however, as a race they hold their own with favorable surroundings, are not decreasing seriously, if at all, and will not settle the problem by dying out.

Mechanically they have proved apt to learn, but slow to execute. Our Hampton Indian work-shops have this year supplied the Indian Department with two thousand pairs of men’s brogan shoes, five hundred dozen articles of tinware, and seventy-five sets of double plow harness, which were pronounced by the inspectors well-made and satisfactory. Carlisle has done more.

Both girls and boys take quickly and kindly to neatness and to industrial pursuits, as well as to books. They are as eager as the Negroes for knowledge, and become more and more so as they advance. Want of ambition is the least of their troubles. Teaching them is hard work, but interesting and stimulating in the highest degree.

They resent injury, but are not revengeful; not a sign of treachery in nearly five years. Religiously, they are, I believe, the most hopeful of the heathen races. The vastness and the grandeur of the West has affected them as desert life has the Arabs; they are remarkably Oriental in customs and ideas. They worship no fetish, there are no idols to break, but they have a crude faith to be cleared, dim eyes to be opened.

Christian efforts, under the care of Archdeacon Kirby of the Episcopal Church, have evangelized ten thousand Indians of British America, in their simple natural life. The mixed, harassed condition of our own, makes the work far more difficult.

The mingling of races at Hampton has worked well; they are mutually helpful and stimulating. An Indian classmate is kindly, thoughtfully treated by his colored compeers. A race that has been led is leading another. The “House-Father,” chief of our sixty Sioux boys, is a negro. With perhaps finer mental and moral texture, the red race does not produce half enough to feed itself; the rougher, stronger blacks have not thrown a pauper upon the country, and raise raw material for the mills of Christendom. With benevolent intentions we have diminished and weakened the one; using the other only for selfish purposes, it has multiplied and grown stronger. Bringing both races under the care of the American Missionary Association is most fitting and wise. Both are peculiarly the concern of the American people, are providentially committed to our care, and are a part of us. In doing for them we are doing for ourselves, our children, and our country.

On the Indian girl rests most heavily the weight of past and present influences. When, in October, 1881, I took 25 Indian boys and five girls back to their Dakota homes, after three years’ training at Hampton, the former were readily placed in rooms by themselves, away from the camp, employed in agency work-shops at the trades they had learned, and thus helped on greatly. The girls could not be so isolated; they had no trades, and though they could make their own garments and do housework, there were not suitable situations for them; they returned to their mothers and grandmothers, who might sell them to the brave who would pay the highest price in ponies for them.

One of the five, an earnest Christian, wrote: “Hard to be good woman out here.” She finally married a white man of good repute. Another is reported as a most satisfactory house servant in the family of a missionary; another keeps her father’s store and books. He is one of the best and most thrifty of Indians; but the family live in one room in a log house. Two others, younger, are waiting an opportunity to return to Hampton for two years’ more training, with a view to becoming teachers.

Teaching is the career for Indian girls, as it has been the one way for colored girls of the South to be more than drudges; there it is the only field for a womanly ambition. The increase of educational work for Indians creates some hope for their girls, on whom rests the future of their race.

There is a tendency to increase our Indians’ course of study to longer than three years. One set having returned, the Indians, whose parental feelings are tender and strong, are more trustful of us, and readily consent to a longer absence of their children. One boy has already returned at his own expense, and another is saving his money for the purpose, both to learn more and to perfect themselves in their trade of shoemaking. The sooner the Indian can stand without government aid, the better. Any boy can return who will pay his way back. This gives a motive to work, and creates appreciation of his opportunities.

For the practical necessities of Indian life their training should be practical.

We give half the day to study and half to labor. An education which does not fit them to take care of themselves may do them more harm than good.

I think that when charity and the government are linked together for Indian work, the former should erect the buildings and maintain the teachers, the latter supply the wants of the body. United States beef and flour and shoes are as good as any body’s, but government employés, as our civil service stands, are not the men to elevate the Indian. The telling factor in all work for men is the person who does it. Unless that shall be supplied from the pure fountains of our Christian civilization it will not, as a rule, be supplied at all. I refer to the educational work at the agencies; there the government day and boarding schools should be strictly responsible to the controlling power, and their moral value will be that of the agent in charge. Missionary institutions should stimulate these, and should be conducted by superior men and women directly responsible to their Eastern supporters. I call it sham missionary work to send out Christian teachers to be supported on public pay. The churches who do that, and some do, are doing nothing. Let us first send our own teachers for the Indians, and then fit them to become their own teachers; to make the teachers is to make the people.

The free Negro schools in the South are vitalized by a number of strong central institutions under Northern men that train the picked growth of the race as teachers. This is, I think, the true relation of Eastern charity to the Indian. There should be an excellent boarding and industrial school at each important agency for this purpose. Getting fifteen dollars a month of government for food and clothing for each pupil need not in the least weaken the independence or morals of teachers. The friends of the Indian will do the rest.

The situation is critical, the opportunity is great; the rising tide of public sentiment, the movement at Washington, the eagerness as well as the exigency of the red man mean much.

But this work needs a leader; it will drag if thrown on an overloaded man. The man is as much as the money; the one will bring the other, both by wise appeals and good work that will commend itself to the country.

For more than a century Indians rejected our civilization; now their thinking men, for they are a race of thinkers, forecast the future and wish their children taught the white man’s way as their only hope.

They do not choose this; they are compelled to it. Hundreds, thousands, are waiting for an education. They beg for what they once refused.

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THE CHINESE.

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REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

Your Committee on the Chinese Mission of the Association have agreed upon the following report:

There are three points which demand special thanksgiving to God.

First. The manifestly wise policy of the Association on the whole question of Christianizing the Chinese. This appears (1) in the noble stand it has taken and the work it is doing for education and Christianity on our Pacific coast, thus uttering a perpetual rebuke to the intolerable selfishness and barbarism of political parties in the passage of the anti-Chinese bill; (2) in the admirable disposition made of the proposed mission in China itself.

The desire of earnest Christian Chinamen in California that a mission be started in Southern China, which might be a “rallying centre” of Christian influence for converted men on their return home, and from which they could “go forth to carry the gospel to their countrymen,” is a desire which must commend itself to reason; and the readiness of these Christian Chinamen to aid such a movement with contributions of their own is worthy of the highest commendation. Moreover, that Hong Kong, that great gateway of Chinese emigration, that district wrenched away from the Chinese by English selfishness and rapacity forty years ago, in the ignominious struggle of the opium war, should be the place agreed upon for that mission, seemed peculiarly fitting. But that this Association should be the body to establish the mission there, thus distracting attention from its great peculiar work at home, and dividing the contributions of American Congregational churches between two foreign Congregational boards in China, could hardly seem wise to any. How gratifying then to learn that this Association, holding to the purpose of no more missions abroad, has successfully arranged with the American Board to accept and carry forward this movement at Hong Kong. The principle of simplicity of arrangement and economical division of labor among our great benevolent societies is thus endorsed once for all.

Second. The second point calling for thanksgiving is the marked success of the work among the Chinese on the Pacific coast. There is no more promising work for China, as a whole, in all the world, than that now being done by the California Chinese Mission. Its fifteen schools, with thirty-one teachers, eleven of whom are converted Chinamen, twenty-five hundred scholars—an increase of almost a thousand over last year, and a hundred and six conversions to Christ, all show that it is no longer a mere experiment. The efficient Christian organization known as the Congregational Association of Christian Chinese, with its missionary spirit and liberal contributions, demonstrate the fact on our own soil that the Chinamen, like others, when touched by the spirit of Christ, are a power for righteousness.

Third. The recent influx of 25,000 Chinamen, hastening to reach our shores before the pagan bill of Congress should go into effect, has suddenly increased the demand for laborers and money.

The work on the Pacific coast ought not to receive less than $13,000 the coming year, that the 125,000 Chinese already in the country may, during the ten years of national disgrace, be quietly fitted to become a great Christian power for the elevation of their countrymen.

While the anti-Chinese outcry from California has filled the ears of the nation, your Committee wishes to recognize with thanksgiving the noble work which many of the Christians of that State have done and are doing for China and for Christ. The Chinese missions of the Association are at present restricted to the State of California. But your Committee are impressed with the importance to the Association, in this part of its work, of full and exact information as to the condition of the Chinese population throughout the country, and as to the work done in their behalf by various Christian agencies, and especially by the local churches of various denominations. And we recommend that a systematic inquiry be instituted on this subject, the result of which shall be reported at the next annual meeting.

JAMES BRAND, _Chairman_.

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ADDRESS OF REV. JAMES BRAND, D.D.

MR. PRESIDENT: At one of the former meetings of this Association, one speaker, in pleading for China, proposed that the audience go with him, in imagination, to the Chinese quarter in San Francisco, in order that from a personal inspection of the thrift, economy and order manifested there he might get an argument for Christian sympathy and support in Chinese education. They did so and the argument was good. At the same meeting, another speaker, pleading the same cause, proposed to the audience to go with him to a more sacred place than the Chinese quarter, namely, the battle-fields of the war, that he might gather from the memory and suggestions of those hallowed places an argument for the maintenance of the national and Christian principles contended for in that war, and hence an argument for the Christian treatment of the Chinese.

Now, in getting the purchase for another argument for the same unhappy people, I propose that you go for a few moments with me to a more sacred place still than either the Chinese quarter or the battle-fields of the war. I mean that upper room where, eighteen centuries ago, occurred that last, long interview between Christ and his disciples, before the crucifixion. Let us reverently step in there and stand behind that little circle of the eleven. Let us catch the spirit and the suggestions of that tender and holy scene. The Divine One is speaking his last words to those men who are soon to go forth and undertake the conversion of the world. What is his most weighty thought? It is that which was expressed in his closing prayer: “As thou hast sent me into the world even so have I sent them into the world;” that is, the mission of Christian men in the world was to be the same as His own. It was to be a mission of vicarious suffering and service for all the world. Men were dying in their sins in all countries. The nations were sitting in the shadow of death. Generations were tramping on, each in the track of the others, to hopeless doom. They did not know God’s redeeming love. It is this spectacle of humanity rushing on to a hopeless eternity, that puts that solemn and intense tone into the Saviour’s voice as He talks and prays. They were to be men like Christ. They were to go into all the world, bearing the love of God.

This is what the world needs. This world of faith in force, and faith in diplomacy, and faith in partisan politics; this world of faith in intellectual skill; this world of brain power, elaborating expedients; this world of self-seeking refinement; these nations that are under the shadow of death are all sending up through the gloom of their moral miseries the inarticulate cry to God for just this Christlike mission of loving men, to the world. This, then, is the warrant; this is the groundwork of my plea for China. It is not that the Chinese are very worthy, or that our nation ought to be very consistent with its fundamental principles, but it is that 400,000,000 souls need a Saviour from sin, and we, whose mission is identical with Christ’s, have something to do in the case. This applies, of course, to all nations as well as the Chinese, but I plead for a special application of the principle to China on two grounds:

I. Because of the vastness and need of China and the peculiar relation it now sustains to ourselves. What have we done for her people? We have shut our door in their face. We have said no poor laboring man of China shall feed his children on our shore for ten years to come. Three hundred and thirty thousand of them will have gone into eternity before these ten black years shall have expired! Do we not hear the echo of that tender voice from that upper room, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto these, ye have done it unto me”?

II. I plead for China because of the wrongs she has suffered at nominally Christian hands, and especially at the hands of the United States Government.

The anti-Chinese bill is a violation of treaty, a violation of the spirit of impartial justice to foreigners, a violation of our own interest, because opposed to the spirit of Christ, which when resisted always reacts. It was carried through, like the opium trade, for present personal advantage on a small scale. It is the child of partisan politics, born out of a fear lest other foreign laborers, finding themselves underbidden by the more economical Chinese, might raise an outcry, and disturb the equilibrium of party power. Hence, to gain votes, one party will sacrifice national policy and Christian principle, and the other will do the same rather than lose votes. Thus China must be affronted, and Christianity dishonored before the world. It is not, however, the American people as such who have done this thing—thank God for that! Whenever the national conscience has spoken at all on the subject, it has spoken against it. This anti-Chinese legislation is the adoption, in America, of the old barbaric cast-off policy of exclusion, which China herself has pursued for centuries toward other nations. China is going forward: we have gone back.

Now what is to be the result in this case? It must be _reaction_. There must come reaction against American commerce, losing more than it gains, reaction against American integrity as to treaty stipulations, awakening Chinese distrust and hate, casting a blight upon Western civilization and, worst of all, defeating American Christianity.

The great American nation has divided at the Chinese quarter. Say what you will, that Chinese quarter in San Francisco has become the great moral _divortium_ or water-shed of America where Christian and anti-Christian sentiment divide. On one side the Chinese workman is mobbed, excluded; on the other he is educated and led to Christ. On the one side men act for party ends and call the Chinaman a “heathen dog;” on the other they recognize him with all his infirmities as a man for whom Christ died, and call him brother. This is a tremendous responsibility we assume when we thus prejudice a fifth part of the human family against the religion of Christ.

Now, then, if we make special pleas for the Indian because we have manifestly wronged him and ought to make amends; if we are under special obligation to the freedman because we have sinned against him, or because he may become an important link between our Christianity and perishing Africa, why is not the same argument good for the Chinese on the Pacific coast? Surely, in God’s sight, these ten black years ought to be ten very bright years for the Christian schools for Chinamen in California. China ought to have at the end of that time a larger force of native missionaries trained up on the Pacific slope than all the Christian workers employed in that great empire to-day. The truth is, we are all taking one side or the other of this question. In deciding which it shall be let us keep in mind the noble sentiment of Henry Richard. Speaking on the opium question in the House of Commons, he said, “I am not ashamed to say that I am one of those who believe that there is a God who ruleth in the kingdom of men, and that it is not safe for a community, any more than an individual, recklessly and habitually to affront those great principles of truth and justice and humanity, on which, I believe, He governs the world. And we may be quite sure of this, that, in spite of our pride of place and power, in spite of our vast possessions and enormous resources, in spite of our boasted force by land and sea, if we come into conflict with that Power we shall be crushed like an egg-shell against the granite rock.”