Chapter 5

But, friends, so long as these are facts, there is an Indian question, and there is going to be one until these things are settled. There is nothing ever settled in this world till it is settled right. In the progress that has been made in opening up the possibility to the Indian, of civil rights, we may be inclined to relax our efforts in his behalf. The passage of the Dawes Land in Severalty Bill was, indeed, a great day for the Indian. It opens the door by which he can have a home on land of his own and become a citizen, with all the privileges thereof. Here, at last, is solid ground upon which he can stand. But we must not forget that that bill is but the commencement of what is needed. He is but a child with new rights truly, but in his ignorance he does not know what they are. He is surrounded by enemies as before. While he has the law and the courts, the nearest Judge may be one hundred to three hundred miles away. He must be brought more under the care of the judiciary.

The Indian Bureau, as at present constituted, cannot do for him what he needs. This is a part of the political machine, and its appointees are selected because they have done good service as ward politicians. It has been well said that such a Bureau is no more fitted to lead these people aright than Pharaoh was to lead the Israelites out of their house of bondage.

To show how even some good men fail to comprehend the situation is evidenced by the proposed "Morgan Bill," which in its practical working would give the Indian Agent--already a despot--even more power than before. By that bill he is made chief Judge, with two Indians as associate Judges; and the agent is given power to select the jurors when a jury is demanded. What a travesty of justice, to make the present agent a judge and give him power to select the jury. With such a bill the friend of the Indian may well say: Oh Lord, how long! We must demand that all Indians, whether on the reservations or not, shall be given full protection of righteous laws, and that the tyrannical methods of the past shall forever cease.

But, with the solid ground of the Dawes bill beneath, and the further protection of the judiciary certain to be given at no distant day, he needs, more than all else besides, the Christian school and the Christian church. He now has "Land." If we are earnest and persistent he will soon have "Law." But, most of all, does he need "Light," and that light which is from above. All the laws we may enact the next hundred years will not change the character of a single Indian. To a considerable extent he is a superstitious pagan still. He needs Jesus Christ. He needs to learn the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. As it is a part of the Indian man's religious belief that his god does not want him to work and he will be punished if he does, it is especially necessary to touch his religious nature first. When he accepts the Christian's God, then he will be ready to go to work for himself. The taking up of the hoe and the spade is his first confession of faith. What has already been accomplished through the new laws giving him his civil rights, puts an added responsibility upon the church. It is the Indian's last chance. Our further neglect is his certain death. Shall we leave him with his "Land and Law" without God? Do we realize that we have lived with these original owners of our soil for more than two and one-half centuries, and yet, today, there are sixty tribes who have no knowledge of Jesus the Christ? Shall we allow longer such a stain? I know well the pressure of various claims in religious work at home and abroad, but in the light of what has been said, is not the duty of Christianizing the Indians a debt of honor, a "preferred claim," which should take precedence over others? In this way only can we partially atone for our "century of dishonor."

The history of the past few months, and the famous order with regard to the use of the vernacular, ought to arouse the church to new efforts. The probable instigators of it are known to friends of the Indian, and it shows the necessity of increased activity on our part. The order was despotism itself, and would have done credit to a Russian Czar. It was a blow aimed at the Indian's highest religious interests, and the President of the United States, instead of explaining and translating it, should have recalled it as an act unworthy of Christian civilization in the nineteenth century. Everything is still done to hamper the Protestant missionary work. The A.M.A. has a theological school, and the Government allows (?) it to teach a theological class; but, when the students are chosen and ready to come, the Government agents prohibit their coming. We have a young man who has been waiting for a year for a permit from Washington. The same obstructive policy meets us when we try to get pupils under the Government school contracts. And even after we have obtained the order from the Government to procure the pupils from a given agency, the Government will, at the same time, instruct the Agent to let no pupils go till the Government schools are full. In this way the Christian Indian parent has taken from him the right to send his child where he desires, for the Government stops his rations and annuities if he refuses to send to the Government school. The vote recently passed at the General Association of Congregational Churches in South Dakota ought to be taken up and echoed through the land, protesting against the assumption, by the Administration, of the right to control our missionary operations, dictating what pupils may attend our schools, or what language may be used in them.

In conclusion, let us gird ourselves anew for the struggle that is before us, to fight the enemies of Protestant Christianity, entrenched as they are in our Government, the Indian ring, the cattle kings, the land grabbers and the thousands whose selfish interest it is to keep the Indian ignorant. This is no holiday affair; it means earnest, determined work. We must give the Indian the Gospel of the Son of God as his only safeguard for the life that now is as well as that which is to come. Civilization, education alone can never lift the Indian to his true position. You may take a rough block of marble and chisel it never so skillfully into some matchless human form, and it is marble still, cold and lifeless. Take the rude Indian and educate him, and he is still an Indian. He must be quickened by the breath of the Almighty before he will live. It is religion alone which can lead him to the truest manhood, which will quicken his slumbering intellectual faculties and prevent him from being an easy prey to the selfishness and sinfulness of men. Let us support this society in its grand work, by our money, our sympathy and our prayers. Let us join in the fight, and by-and-by we will share in the triumph. Dr. Strieby, you can remember just before this society was formed, that it was a disgrace to be an abolitionist. It is a glory now. The day is not far distant, yea, its light is already breaking in the western sky, when it will be considered equally glorious to have helped save our Indian brother, by leading him back again to God. And while we are doing it, and as a means to this end, we must try to get this Indian ring by the throat and strangle its life. It has lived long enough on the blood of the Indian; let it die, and we will never say "the Lord have mercy on its soul," for it has none. If you have never been interested in the matter before, begin to-day; if you have never helped before, help now. Get in somewhere, get in quick, get in all over; do not stand around the edges looking on and criticising others; be sure you get your pocket book open, and send the Treasurer of the Association double what you did last year; do something, do anything. We have been playing at missions long enough. With our great wealth it is a disgrace that this work was not completed long ago. With an aroused and awakened Church the whole problem will be solved, for there will be no more Indians, but only brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus.

Let us fear nothing, God is with us and we shall triumph. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

* * * * *

REPORT ON CHINESE WORK.

BY REV. SIMEON GILBERT, D.D., CHAIRMAN.

1. Is it worth while to attempt Christian missions among the Chinese in our own country?

2. If so, of how much importance is it?

3. Who should do it?

4. If anything is to be done by us, how much should be done?

5. And is there any case of urgency about it?

To the first question we answer: Yes, verily! It is worth while. There is no form of Christian missions within the circuits of the earth more worthy of being done, and of being done with all possible alacrity and vigor, than this. The American Missionary Association is exactly the Society to do it. It is the glory of this Society to hasten to the rescue of the despised and the exceptional races and classes in our own land. It has already done grand things toward the evangelization of the Chinese among us. It has set an example, most conspicuous in the eyes of all the people, of definitely planning to make known to this peculiar people the Gospel of Redemption; a Gospel whose supreme peculiarity it is, that it is fitted to meet the inmost necessities of all men, of all men alike.

The success in winning the disciples of Confucius to the cross and the grace of Christ has been signal enough to show how completely practicable the undertaking is.

If it were not worth while to press our missionary effort among the Chinese right here in America, it would be absurd to talk of missionary effort among the Chinese in China. The importance of this work cannot be measured by its bulk. Nor is it to be estimated by any census of countable immediate results. It is a kind of work, which, according as it is done, or left undone; or as it is done with slack and nerveless hand or with vim and vigor, will test the very character of our churches; will touch the conscience and well-being of the nation; and will, without a doubt, have vital and decisive connection with the future of that most populous empire on the globe.

There is China, with its four hundred million souls, subject to a single sovereign--a heathen empire. Here is America, Christian America; the foremost republic among the nations, and soon to be the leading power among the Governments of the earth. It holds already the position of moral leadership in the far East. What shall be done with this leadership? Right here in our midst are some two hundred thousand representatives of that empire, every one of whom with hardly an exception hopes some time to return to his native Orient. What will the Christianity of America do for them?

There is an unmistakable providence of God in the presence, in the country, at such a time as this, of so many representatives of the great empire. Such providences are to be reverently heeded. They are as the banners of the Almighty, meant to lead forth His loyal people to the gracious conquest of the world. As for ourselves, what are we disposed to do about it?

This conquest of the world for Christ is not to be achieved by hap-hazard dashes. There is need of transcendent wisdom in the strategic methods of the campaign. We have not wisdom enough for this except as we have the wisdom to note which way the manifest hand of God is pointing for us. Then is the time for assurance, for obedience, and for enthusiasm in the fullest meaning of the term.

A few thousand Chinamen are here. The Chinese Empire is open to us--and more too! To doubt the practicability of the Christianization of the Chinese would be treason to the Gospel of Christ; would be blindness to the facts of Christian history, as well as to the foreshadowings of prophecy.

The success already in this department of the work of the American Missionary Association has been signal enough to amount to a demonstration. If suitably reinforced and pushed it might presently be made vastly greater than it has as yet been.

It is the glory of this Society to do precisely this kind of work. All its history and traditions, all the confidences and affection of the people in our churches toward it, favor the most resolute pushing forward of what has been undertaken.

The reactionary effect of this peculiar form of home-foreign mission work upon the Christian character and culture of our own people is of importance; of too much importance for it to be either safe or wise for us to neglect it. Suppose this work were to be neglected, this duty ignored, this clear providential summons slighted, what a mockery it would be of our professed zeal for foreign missions. The spectacle of what the Society is doing for the Chinese, especially of what it ought to have the power and the commission given it to do, is fitted to be peculiarly impressive, as an object lesson, to the nation. The radical character of a nation comes out in no other way so distinctively, as in the way it treats its weakest and most helpless subjects.

A grand part of the good done by the American Missionary Association has been in its influence, first on the conscience of the churches, and then, through this, on the moral sense and the moral sentiments of the nation itself. This has been the case as regards the nation's treatment of the emancipated negroes. It was this Society which, so promptly and gloriously, lifted up and bore aloft with something of a divine intrepidity, God's own banner of human rights and the divine sympathy. It is this Society which has done more than any other one agency, to revolutionize and harmonize the national sentiment as regards the rights of the Indian to civilization and to Christianization. If now the churches of our country will hasten to do their duty, as in sight of him who is Father of us all, towards our Chinese neighbors, it will not be long before the National Government will wake to its shame and wipe off the deep disgrace of its recent demagogy and international perfidy.

Moreover, a more complete mistake could not be made than to imagine that the Imperial Government of China is unobservant, whatever the seeming invincibility of its pride and exclusiveness. China is neither blind nor insensible. Japan has awakened; China is wakening. Its hour is at hand; the dust of ages is stirring. The Chinese wall is vanishing. The Supreme Government of the four hundred millions of the Empire is at length getting in touch with the other great and advancing Powers of the world. And the startling sublime fact of the new _world sociability_, if we will but see it, is giving tremendous urgency to every possible means of originating, multiplying, communicating, and sending on and around from nation to nation, the forces of the world-redeeming Gospel of Jesus Christ. We, therefore, are most earnestly agreed in the conviction that, not only is the noble work of missions among the Chinese in our country, now being done by this Society, of inestimable value, but that it ought by all means to be greatly and immediately enlarged and re-enforced.

That great missionary, St. Paul, once said--and he may have often said it--that he gloried in his own infirmities; adding that the power of Christ might rest on him. This is our glory--if we have any. Here is this American Missionary Association; and over against it, face to face, is China. What proportion is there between the two? How preposterous, one may say, the thought which we are trying to frame into actual purpose for the regeneration of this enormous part of the human family? Most true. And yet, along with Paul's thought, how infinitely inspiring this purpose should be. Just the thing for us to do is to "build better than we know." It is not our eye, but His, which sees the end from the beginning. And it is his providence--sometimes as a pillar of fire, sometimes as a pillar of cloud--which shows us the way. Then it is for us to follow close up.

When some fifteen years ago, that slender, forlorn-seeming Japanese lad landed in Boston, with the strange, vague, resistless, heaven-enkindled longing in his heart; what if there had been no kindly hand to grasp his own, no heart to discern and respond to his? How easily might young Neesima have been lost, and the fateful turn in the destiny of Japan at the moment of its supreme opportunity for regeneration been vastly, disastrously different! What Chinese Neesimas to-day God's eye may have under His gracious watch and merciful leading, we cannot know beforehand; but this is certain, that we know enough to know that we do well to walk softly all the day long as seeing things invisible, and that with these thousands of Chinese among us, walking so noiselessly, so observantly in and out beneath the very tree of life that grows beside the river of life clear as crystal, and which proceeds direct from the throne of the Lamb, there are doubtless God's hidden ones, whose lives, if we will do our part; shall yet be woven in as shining and mighty threads into the divine plan wider than any nation, larger than the world, sure and strong as the word of Him who, at the first, said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

* * * * *

REPORT OF FINANCE COMMITTEE.

BY DR. L.C. WARNER, CHAIRMAN.

Your Committee have made a careful examination of the books and reports of the Treasurer, with special reference to the methods of keeping the various accounts, the security of the invested funds and the economy and prudence of the expenditures.

We find the system of bookkeeping as thorough and complete as that of any business concern. Each item of receipts or expense appears in its proper place, where it can be found without delay. The different departments of the work are classified and separated so that a broad and comprehensive knowledge of the work is always before the officers and Executive Committee. All payments are made by checks, and each check requires the signature of two officers of the Association; thus reducing to a minimum the chances of error or loss in the disbursement of the funds. At the end of each quarter the disbursements of the Association are carefully examined by the Auditors, two responsible business men, who go over and verify the accounts item by item. The Treasurer and other officers of the Association are to be especially commended for the thorough and business-like methods which prevail in the conduct of their business.

The invested funds of the Association amount to $230,375.78, yielding an income last year of $10,936.46. These funds are chiefly invested in mortgages in the city and State of New York and in Government bonds. In view of the forgeries of real estate mortgages recently discovered in New York City, the mortgages of the Association in New York and Brooklyn have, at the request of the attorney of the Association, been personally examined by a member of the Finance Committee and all found to be valid and correct. An examination of the schedule of securities held by the Association shows that there is not a single poor investment among them, or one on which the interest is in default.

Besides the invested funds the Association owns real estate in various Southern States and in the Northwest to the value of $600,274. This is the working plant of the Association. The buildings, apparatus and fixtures upon this property are protected by insurance.

The expenditures of the Association during the past year have been $328,788.43. This is an increase over the expenditure of last year. The Association commenced the year with a balance of $2,193.80; it closes the year with a debt of $5,641.20. It has therefore spent $7,835.01 in excess of its receipts. This debt is to be greatly regretted, for it should be the policy of the Association to plan its work in accordance with the funds at its disposal. They are obliged, however, to make their plans partly on faith, and it is not to be expected that their faith will always exactly measure the benevolence of the people.

The increase in expenditure has been entirely in the work done upon the field; the cost of agencies and administration being less this year than last. This increase has been mostly in the Southern field, and has been imperatively demanded by the natural growth of the work. Very little new work has been undertaken, four new schools only being added during the year; but the schools already organized have grown in size and therefore in expense. Eleven hundred and twenty more pupils are in attendance than one year ago, an increase of over 12 per cent. This has required the employment of twenty additional teachers.

Friends of the Association have added new buildings at some of the schools, and these new buildings, greatly needed and greatly increasing the effectiveness of the schools, also bring increased expense. The churches and schools of the Association are doing all they can for their own support. The spirit of self-help is constantly encouraged among them, but they are too poor to bear any considerable part of the expense.

The Association must therefore meet one of the three following alternatives: First, the growth of its work must cease, and the increasing number of pupils who apply to its schools year by year be denied admittance; or second, some of the schools which have been fostered by the Association for years must be abandoned, that funds may be left to strengthen and develop the remainder; or third, the churches and Christian givers of America must largely increase their gifts to this Association to meet its increasing wants.

The work of the Association for the coming year cannot be efficiently carried on without increased appropriations; $300,000 is the smallest amount which should be expended in the South, and a much larger amount could be wisely used. The mountain work among the poor whites is full of promise, and calls loudly for our aid, and the Association only waits for the necessary funds to greatly enlarge its efforts in this field. In addition to the Southern field, the Indian work requires at least $60,000, and the Chinese work $15,000. This makes the total amount needed by the Association next year $375,000. This we believe to be a moderate and conservative estimate.

This great work for the Negro, the Indian and the Chinese has been laid upon the American Missionary Association, and upon our denomination, as it has not been laid upon any other society or denomination in this country. It is our duty, yea, rather, our great opportunity. Shall we not then meet it as the stewards of God, whose servants and disciples we are?

* * * * *

MEMORIAL SERVICE.

ADDRESSES IN EULOGY OF THE LATE DR. JAMES POWELL.

An interesting and impressive memorial service was that held in honor of the loved and venerated Secretary, Dr. James Powell. Tender, loving, graceful and eloquent eulogies upon his life and character were pronounced by Rev. Dr. Gilbert, Rev. Dr. Ide, Secretary Strieby and President Taylor, followed by an earnest prayer by Rev. Addison P. Foster, Roxbury, Mass.

EULOGY BY REV. DR. GILBERT.

It would be impossible for the officers and friends of this Society to convene on this occasion and not feel profoundly the absence of one whose presence for so many years has done so much to fill these occasions with the spirit of welcome, of lofty animation, joyance, cheer and renewed courage.

Last Christmas the "sweet chariot" of God "swung low," and our brother Powell was suddenly taken up from these great services here to other and larger tasks and joys in the heavens. A life so radiant and beneficent on earth, what must it be now that it has been translated, and transfigured into the celestial?