Part 1

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EDITORIAL.

PAGE HAPPY NEW YEAR, 1 PARAGRAPHS, 2 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, 3 WHAT SOME WOMEN ARE DOING. Rev. A. H. Bradford, D.D., 4 THE INDIAN PROBLEM. Pres. J. H. Seelye, D.D., 7 ADDRESS OF REV. Dr. C. I. SMITH, 10 WELL SAID. REV. A. G. Haygood, D.D., 11

THE SOUTH.

NOTES IN THE SADDLE. Supt. C. J. Ryder, 12 A CONTRAST, 14

BUREAU OF WOMAN’S WORK.

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY, 16 WORK AMONG THE FREEDMEN. Miss Bertha Robertson, 19 WORK AMONG THE INDIANS. Miss H. B. Ilsley, 23

RECEIPTS, 27

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NEW YORK:

PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION.

Rooms, 56 Reade Street.

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Price, 50 Cents a Year, in Advance.

Entered at the Post-Office at New York, N.Y., as second-class matter.

American Missionary Association.

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PRESIDENT, Hon. WM. B. WASHBURN, LL.D., Mass.

_Vice-Presidents._

Rev. A. J. F. BEHRENDS, D.D., N.Y. Rev. F. A. NOBLE, D.D., Ill. Rev. ALEX. MCKENZIE, D.D., Mass. Rev. D. O. MEARS, D.D., Mass. Rev. HENRY HOPKINS, Mo.

_Corresponding Secretary._

REV. M. E. STRIEBY, D.D., _56 Reade Street, N.Y._

_Associate Corresponding Secretaries._

Rev. JAMES POWELL, D.D., _56 Reade Street, N.Y._ Rev. A. F. BEARD, D.D., _56 Reade Street, N.Y._

_Treasurer._

H. W. HUBBARD, Esq., _56 Reade Street, N.Y._

_Auditors._

PETER MCCARTEE. CHAS. P. PEIRCE.

_Executive Committee._

JOHN H. WASHBURN, Chairman. A. P. FOSTER, Secretary.

_For Three Years._ S. B. HALLIDAY. SAMUEL HOLMES. SAMUEL S. MARPLES. CHARLES L. MEAD. ELBERT B. MONROE.

_For Two Years._ J. E. RANKIN. WM. H. WARD. J. L. WITHROW. JOHN H. WASHBURN. EDMUND L. CHAMPLIN.

_For One Year._ LYMAN ABBOTT. A. S. BARNES. J. R. DANFORTH. CLINTON B. FISK. A. P. FOSTER.

_District Secretaries._

Rev. C. L. WOODWORTH, D.D., _21 Cong’l House, Boston_. Rev. J. E. ROY, D.D., _151 Washington Street, Chicago_.

_Financial Secretary for Indian Missions._

Rev. CHARLES W. SHELTON.

_Field Superintendent._

Rev. C. J. RYDER, _56 Reade Street, N.Y._

_Bureau of Woman’s Work._

_Secretary_, Miss D. E. EMERSON, _56 Reade Street, N.Y._

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COMMUNICATIONS

Relating to the work of the Association may be addressed to the Corresponding Secretaries; those relating to the collecting fields, to Rev. James Powell, D.D., or to the District Secretaries; letters for “THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY,” to the Editor, at the New York Office.

DONATIONS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

In drafts, checks, registered letters or post office orders may be sent to H. W. Hubbard, Treasurer, 56 Reade Street, New York, or, when more convenient, to either of the Branch Offices, 21 Congregational House, Boston, Mass., or 151 Washington Street, Chicago, Ill. A payment of thirty dollars at one time constitutes a Life Member.

FORM OF A BEQUEST.

“I BEQUEATH to my executor (or executors) the sum of —— dollars, in trust, to pay the same in —— days after my decease to the person who, when the same is payable, shall act as Treasurer of the ‘American Missionary Association,’ of New York City, to be applied, under the direction of the Executive Committee of the Association, to its charitable uses and purposes.” The Will should be attested by three witnesses.

THE

AMERICAN MISSIONARY.

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VOL. XLI. JANUARY, 1887. NO. 1.

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American Missionary Association.

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1887.

THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY wishes all its readers and friends a “Happy New Year.” The memory of the old year makes this salutation a hearty one. God has blessed our work in a signal manner both at the North and at the South. Our appeals have been heard and have met with generous responses. The religious press has rendered us most valuable aid. Friends have interested friends in our behalf. The debt has been almost wiped out. The year of 1886 stands conspicuous in its attestation of the favor God has given the Association in the eyes of the churches. Our greeting, therefore, is not merely formal. We have occasion to be grateful. Will our friends then please be assured of our gratitude, as entering upon the work of 1887 we wish for them, one and all, a “Happy New Year.”

This is the time to make resolutions. Good resolutions now formed and faithfully carried out will be certain to make the new year a happy one. We would suggest that the resolutions passed at the National Council at Chicago and adopted as its own by our annual meeting at New Haven, asking for $350,000 from the churches this year for our work, be approved by every reader of THE MISSIONARY, with this one added, “_Resolved_, that I will do my part as an individual to make these resolutions effectual.” If this resolution is heartily adopted and lived up to, then certain results will follow: (1) The sixty per cent. increase upon the contributions of last year, that the amount called for necessitates, will be secured. (2) A larger number of churches will be found among those contributing to the A. M. A. than has ever yet been recorded. (3) Special appeals will not be heard. (4) Demanded enlargement of work at a number of points will be made, and new fields entered. (5) Our missionaries will be made happy in the knowledge that their work is to be sustained.

We feel that we can ask God’s blessing upon all who thus resolve with an assurance of faith that the blessing will be bestowed where the resolution is kept.

One of the crying evils of the times is the severe tax put upon the eyes by reading small print. THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY has been an offender in this respect, but it has seen the error of its ways and promises to try to do better. It has selected the first month of the new year in which to inaugurate the reform. Small print has been banished from its pages of reading matter. We trust that this effort of The Missionary to make its pages more readable will be responded to by a great increase in the number of its readers. The annual subscription is only fifty cents.

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NOTES IN THE SADDLE, by Field-Superintendent Ryder, is a heading under which will be found, on another page, some good reading. We hope to continue these _notes_ during the year. We caution our readers against falling into the phonetic craze when they read this announcement. We are not responsible for the way in which our Superintendent spells his name, but we presume he follows the analogy of “ancient t_y_me.” At any rate, he who in the saddle, with reins over the neck and speed unchecked, can make notes, must be an expert _rider_, no matter how we spell or pronounce his name.

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We ask the special attention of our lady readers to the present number of _The Missionary_. They will find Miss Emerson’s report and the papers presented by Miss Robertson and Miss Ilsley at the New Haven meeting, which we print elsewhere, to be most interesting reading. We are very sorry that space does not permit us to also print the most excellent address of Mrs. St. Clair. Any lady who has the January Missionary in her possession and allows the next Woman’s Missionary Meeting to be a dull one, ought to be disciplined for not living up to her privileges. Just read this number through and see if you don’t think so too.

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Immediately following the annual meeting, under the charge of Secretary Shelton, Rev. A. L. Riggs, with Pastor Ehnamani and the Santee School Indian students, started through New England upon a speaking and singing campaign in behalf of our Indian Missions. At the same time, Secretary Roy, accompanied by Rev. Geo. V. Clark, of Athens, Ga., an ex-slave and a child of the A. M. A., started in upon a similar campaign through Ohio. For six weeks, meetings were held almost every night in the week, with occasional meetings in the afternoon. On Sundays three meetings were usually held. Large audiences, sometimes crowded, even on week nights, have greeted and with interest listened to them. At Cleveland both forces joined, devoting a Sabbath to the Congregational churches in that city. The Monday evening following, a final meeting of the Ohio campaign was held in Oberlin, where the magnificent audience and spirit of the meeting were a worthy close to the series and in perfect keeping with the historic record of Oberlin on the subject of missions. Here the bands separated to meet at the end of one week in Oak Park, where Secretary Roy with his family resides, and where Secretary Shelton formerly resided. The Congregational church of Oak Park was crowded to its utmost capacity with those who came to attend the final meetings of the two campaigns and to listen to the singing and the speaking of both forces. A beautiful incident in this meeting was the solo singing of a slave song by Mr. Clark, the chorus to which was taken up by the Indian students; and another incident in the same direction was the rendering of a slave song, in the chorus to which both the audience and the students responded.

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To repair the damage done our mission home and school buildings by the earthquake at Charleston a careful estimate calls for not less than $2,500. One of our teachers, Mr. E. A. Lawrence, has been meeting the emergency by holding school in a barn. The time has come when the necessary repairs must be made, both upon the home and school. Hundreds of scholars are waiting and parents are begging that Avery Institute be again opened. In response to our former appeals for Charleston some special donations have been received, but they are entirely inadequate to meet the emergency. We beg leave to remind our friends that the money needed to make these repairs must be furnished either by special contributions or else taken out of money already appropriated to other work. We trust they will not leave us to be compelled to do the latter. It may also be added that to delay these repairs much longer will result in the ruin of the buildings.

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REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS.

The Second Annual Report of Commissioner Atkins is a candid and comprehensive document, dealing briefly but frankly with the several problems growing out of the relations of the Government to the Indians. We have not space for a review of the Report, but we wish to call special attention to the facts which it incidentally presents as to the neglect of Congress, and especially of the House of Representatives, to act upon a number of important bills touching Indian affairs. No less than eight such bills are mentioned—six of them passed the Senate, but failed to receive final action in the House—and some of these are by far the most essential to the welfare of the Indians. Three of these bills we wish particularly to name: The Dawes’ Bill for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty; the Sioux Bill for the Division of the great Sioux Reservation into six reservations; and the Bill for the Relief of the Mission Indians in California. The first of these is fundamental to the settlement of the Indians in separate homes, and consequently to their becoming American citizens; the second has the same end in view; and the third is a simple act of justice, long and shamefully deferred, to the suffering and deserving Indians, whose sad case has been so pathetically depicted by Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson in her touching story of Romona.

We ask attention to these bills for a practical purpose. Congress should be urged to act upon them at once. The present session is the short one, ending March 4th. If this session closes without passing these bills, the whole subject will be deferred almost indefinitely. The next Congress will be a new one; the Members to some extent will be new; the committees maybe wholly so, and they may need years of petitioning, educating and inspiring to move them to proper action on these essential topics. No time can be lost. No influence is so great upon the average Congressman as letters directly from his constituents. We therefore urge every reader of these pages to write at once to the Member of Congress from his district, or to others whom he may know, asking for prompt and energetic efforts for the passage of these bills.

On another page of THE MISSIONARY will be found the admirable address of President Seelye, presenting the paramount importance of religious effort on the part of the churches in behalf of the Indians. We are in full accord with this view. But the Government has also its responsibilities, and all that it does in the lines we have suggested will only facilitate the work of preparing the Indians for what we wish them all ultimately to be, intelligent, self-supporting Christian citizens.

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WHAT SOME WOMEN ARE DOING.

REV. A. H. BRADFORD, D.D.

This is woman’s era. Her influence and presence are in all spheres. Within a quarter of a century there were few in stores, and none in public offices. To-day they are clerks, operators in the factories, teachers in schools; they are in telegraph, and telephone, and post-offices; they are artists and traders; a few are captains of steamboats; a few are lawyers; now and then one ventures to preach; and even the mysteries of Wall Street are not terrifying to them, for they have commenced competition with the brokers. Women have already won recognition in the practice of medicine, and are among the most successful practitioners in all great cities. They are among the most popular lecturers. At least one of the most successful publishing houses in New York is owned and managed by a woman. In business and on the platform she has ceased to be a curiosity.

The power of woman in politics is not appreciated, but it is one of the most vital forces of this century. No Anarchist in Paris could influence the Faubourgs quicker than Louise Michel. In the history of Nihilism in Russia no names have been regarded with more devotion by those struggling for wider liberty, and none more dreaded by the existing order, than Sophie Perovskaia, Jessy Helfman and Vera Zassulic. Charles Dickens never exhibited a truer insight into human nature than when he made a woman the impersonation of remorseless vengeance.

But notwithstanding all that women are doing in trades, industries, politics, it still remains that in works of reform, charity and missions, she is especially distinguishing herself.

Two of the largest and most efficient charitable institutions in the world, viz: “The Deaconesses’ Institution of Rhenish Westphalia, at Kaiserwent,” and “The Mildmay Conference Hall and Deaconesses’ Home, in London,” are almost exclusively in the hands of women. The influence of these two noble charities reaches around the world, not only in works of beneficence, but also in active evangelistic ministry.

The first person to call attention to the horrible condition of English prisons was Elizabeth Fry. The horrors of war were immeasurably mitigated by Florence Nightingale. She gave an impetus to the work of training nurses, which has grown into enthusiasm in all civilized lands. Agnes Jones changed the work-house hospitals of Great Britain, from places of torture into places of blessing. Sister Dora glorified the “Black Country” by her heroism and self-sacrifice. The first person to make practical a good plan for improved tenement houses was Octavia Hill. Her efforts reach the people which such houses as those built by the Peabody estate only displace.

In this country the most conspicuous effort to improve the low-class of tenement houses has also been made by a woman. The success Miss Collins has won in Gotham Court is one of the most noticeable in the history of such efforts. The Bureau of Charities in New York is very largely managed by Mrs. Lowell and her devoted co-workers. The President of the American Branch of the Red Cross Society, that non-sectarian, but most Christian Association, which extends its arms of blessing wherever human suffering is found, is that American Florence Nightingale, whose heroism and sacrifice on Southern battle-fields can never be too highly appreciated—Clara Barton. And these are only hints, here and there, of woman’s work in charity.

If now we turn to her service in Reform we are met, at once, by the fact that not even the fiery eloquence of Phillips, nor the unconquerable agitations of Garrison did so much to hasten the abolition of slavery as the persuasion and persuasive eloquence of Mrs. Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. People were beguiled into reading that, who would not have listened to a word from the equally sincere, but more rampant agitators.

After the abolition of slavery there remained that other relic of barbarism, entrenched in a far more impregnable position, the rum-power. Intemperance has had to meet many who have attacked it in past days, but never yet an organization so tireless in effort, so fertile in expedients, and so exhaustless in resources as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. That association has made many mistakes, and is in danger of making many more, but one of the elements of its power is its willingness to learn. If it cannot fight with one weapon it adopts another. The brewers and distillers have millions of money at their command, but millions of money are not so formidable as millions of motherly hearts.

If now we turn to that other evil, more subtly and surely ruinous even than intemperance, impurity and the social evil, we find a new organization rising with great promise of power, viz.: The White Cross Society. The aim of that Association is to promote purity. It reaches out its hands to young men and women alike, and that work, in its organized form, owes its existence to the fertile brain and motherly heart of Josephine Butler, the wife of a canon of an English cathedral.

If woman works for the salvation of the physical life of her brothers and sisters, of course she must be equally anxious for the salvation of their souls. Woman has an instinct for religion. Living a life of greater seclusion than man, her heart in the silence, like a flower in the darkness, has grown toward the light. And this spiritual faculty has found the natural field for its operations in missionary work. The first American missionary martyr was Harriet Newell. Grand as was the life, and courageous as was the heart of Adoniram Judson, in all that called for heroism and consecration he was surpassed by his first wife, the beautiful, the almost preternaturally heroic Ann Hasseltine.

Women preponderate in all the departments of missionary activity. They are in distant lands as teachers, Bible-readers, nurses, physicians, missionaries’ wives. They go enthusiastically to homes in dug-out houses, and teach school and rear and train children, and keep the house, and do the drudgery, and then go to heaven, without complaining of earthly obscurity. They are among the Indians on their reservations, and in the Chinese quarters of the Pacific cities. But it has sometimes seemed to me that the most difficult and unattractive work for Christ that woman has ever undertaken, has been among the millions of blacks in the South. The work itself in many instances, if not all, has been disagreeable, if not repulsive. It has been at home, and has not inspired the enthusiastic admiration which has been given to those who have been in the foreign field. It has been attended with misconception, social ostracism, and sometimes with personal danger not found in any other branch of missionary service. But in all parts of the South are women at work with no motive but the love of Christ and humanity, winning souls by their Christ-like examples, and refining the uncultivated and vicious by the sweetness and purity of their unconsciously beautiful lives.

Woman’s work for woman among the blacks of the United States is the most important of all work for that people. Pure women have lessons to teach their own sex who have been degraded by a century of bondage, or who are the inheritors of the legacies of slavery, that none others can teach, and which must be well learned before there can be much progress in the moral amelioration of the race.

Her enthusiasm, her swift hostility to the more degrading sins, her sympathy which bears all the sorrows of those around her, her intuition of the Divine Fatherhood, and her patience, qualify woman for kinds of work which most men can never do so well. But there is one thing that men can do—they can remember the Apostle’s injunction, “Help those women.”

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THE INDIAN PROBLEM.

ADDRESS OF PRES. JULIUS H. SEELYE, D.D., AT NEW HAVEN.

The whole number of Indians in the United States, including Alaska, probably is not far from 300,000, of whom about one-half now wear citizen’s dress, and about one-fourth speak the English language sufficiently to be understood. Some of these people are citizens, and some are wards of the nation. They differ from each other as they differ from us, in their languages and thoughts and ways. They represent nearly every grade of civilized and savage life. Their original rights to a large portion of our national domain we have recognized by purchase and by treaties, which have plighted the faith of the nation for their protection and support. We certainly desire to live in peace with them, but with many of them we are in constant danger of war. What shall we do with them and for them? How shall we wisely maintain our rights respecting them, and at the same time righteously fulfill our obligations? How shall the Indian cease to disturb us, and become a blessing to the nation?

There is really but one solution to the Indian problem, though many have been prominently attempted. We have tried to force the Indian. We have fought him. We have shut him in upon reservations. We have made a pretence of feeding and clothing him. We have tried our hand at civilization, have built school-houses, provided teachers, and gathered Indian children together, and taught them the rudiments of learning. We have furnished them with implements and helps to agriculture, and some of the mechanic arts. But the results, it must be admitted, are not re-assuring. When we fight Indians, they fight too, and their fighting is apt to be, in proportion to their numbers, much more successful than ours. In the Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1868, there is an estimate of the expenditure of some late Indian wars, from which we learn that it has cost the United States Government on an average one million of dollars, and the lives of twenty-five white men to kill an Indian. “There is no good Indian but a dead Indian,” said Gen. Sheridan, Lieutenant-general of our army, but the process of making the Indians good in this way is at least a costly one, and the prospect of success can hardly be considered hopeful.