Civilization and ultimate absorption into the body politic should be the one purpose steadily pursued. Military means cannot accomplish it. “Civilizing agencies must come from civil life.” The testimony is that the influence of military posts in or near Indian reservations is generally prejudicial to good morals, good order, and progress in civilization. To teach Indian children to read and write, or Indian men to sow and reap, are emphatically civil and not military occupations.
The summary of recommendations, which are not new, but none the less worthy of consideration on that account, is as follows:
1st. Government of Indians by law. 2d. Division of reservation lands and homestead rights. 3d. Larger appropriations for the support of schools. 4th. Consolidation of agencies, and reduction of expense. 5th. Gradation of salaries on an equitable basis.
In view of the excellent results, and the greater promise _of the peace policy_, and of the imminent danger of the speedy transfer of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the War Department, it behooves every friend of the red man, who hopes for his ultimate civilization and citizenship, to bring every legitimate influence to bear upon our legislators to prevent the consummation of this scheme.
Reader, do you know the mind of your senator and representative upon this subject? If you do not, will you not find it out, and do all that you can to make him a minister of peace, and not of war, to these poor people?
The fourth article in _Scribner’s_, for April, is entitled “King David.” That regal personage proves to be only David King—a long, lank, awkward, shy, near-sighted Yankee, who, up among the New Hampshire hills, felt an inward call to go South and teach the blacks. He was a man not much missed from his old home, and not warmly welcomed at his new one. He was good, but not wise nor practical. The blacks came to him, young and old, in flocks, to learn to read, and he taught them morning, noon and night. But all the while the white planters “regarded the schoolmaster as an interloper, a fanatic, a knave or a fool, according to their various degrees of bitterness.” He tried the experiment of offering work to the idle blacks, but with little success. And now a Northern carpet-bagging politician, of the baser sort, came into his vicinity, and finding him an honest man, with some influence over the poor freedmen, set himself to overthrow it by offers of whiskey and promises of power. And poor David, innocent, and ignorant of human nature, makes weak and ineffectual fight with him, as he had before with haughty planters and ignorant negroes, yields the ground and goes home again, baffled and discouraged.