intelligent observer of their character. Mons. Peniere speaks thus on the subject of intermarriages: Encourage marriages between the whites and Indians. The second generation resulting from these alliances would be totally white and beautiful. The Indians in general are better shaped and more robust than the whites, and their birth is as pure and as noble as ours.'

And of similar import, but less boldness, as if the theory should be kept yet on social quarantine, were passages in a paper read at the Mohonk Lake Conference, in 1886, by Mr. Philip C. Garrett: "Some prejudice, it is true, appears against the idea of admixture or mingling, in the sense of intermarriage and entire loss of race identity. But it is impossible to prevent the mingling of blood on the same soil, even if desirable. A large part of the population enumerated as Indian is now half-breed. . . . Nor am I sure that the fusion of the whole Indian population in that of the United States would be to the detriment of the latter. On the contrary, I am quite sure it would not be to its serious detriment.

Are we not straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel'? God has placed them and us together; the Indian first in point of time, the white man next. We are descended from a common father; God has made us of one blood'; nor have we any right, except that derived from power, to withhold from them any privileges or immunities which we grant to the more civilized people. In all this, I do not recommend the intermingling of the races; but I do not fear it -the nightmare of a confusion of

races." 1

As to the quality of the father of many of the half-breeds, much is to be considered. Some of them have cast off civilization and have barbarized themselves. Others never had any civilization to cast off, but are from birth and breeding of a semianimal grade, and live lives of the instincts and low passions. "As a rule, they abandon every respect for decency, and are leaders of the most disturbing element, and often the means of creating uneasiness among the Indians. They have no higher ambition than to enjoy the rights of an Indian."2 This is said of the "squaw men." Of the sporadic and miscellaneous offspring of the joined races better stock might be wished, but, according to the laws of heredity, the children of the " squaw man must be often mere human trash.

1 Eighteenth Annual Report of the Board of the Indian Commissioners, 1886, Appendix D, Mohonk Lake Conference, pp. 52, 53.

2 Indian Commissioner's Report, 1885, p. 78.

And in one of the Indian Commissioner's Reports this fact is dwelt on, with important reflections :

"A serious difficulty in the not distant future is before these tribes [Choctaws and Chickasaws], arising from the large and steady influx of white people. Since the emancipation of their slaves, these Indians have sought exemption from labor by inviting emigration of the lowest whites from the surrounding States, to whom they rent their lands for one third of the crops raised. These whites, once in the country, are seldom known to leave, and thus their numbers are rapidly increasing; the result will be a mixture of the lowest white blood with the Indian, thus propagating, instead of curing, the indolence and unthrift with which they are already cursed."1

The same misfortune came on the Pueblos by intermarriage with low and inferior whites. "We know that it is the rule that wandering, broken-down, and poverty-stricken white men are adopted by women, who casually offer aid with their native generosity and pity, and afterwards become the willing slaves of these waifs. . . . Then the faith and good works, the care and tenderness, are all on the gentler side, and this in spite of desertion and neglect." 2

...

Hence the fact that the Pueblos, though pagan, have fallen off in civilization and general morality since the Europeans came among them, about 1540 and afterwards.

Sometimes it would seem that not only the bloods, but the wild border passions of the two races combined. Strife and competition for ascendency and gain in the rough interior ignored the limits of a common civilization and humanity even. In the Congressional discussions between the adoption of the two Oregon Boundary Treaties, 1842 and 1846, Buchanan said: "The Hudson Bay Company had murdered four hundred or five hundred of our citizens, as we have learned from good authority, either directly with their own hands, or indirectly through the agency of the Indians, who were under their exclusive control. They had murdered and expelled all our citizens who had gone there for the purpose of interfering with their hunting and trafficking and trading." Choate said that this was done in the strife between the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwestern Company, between 1808 and 1821. Of course it was inevitable that in those domestic forest alliances civilization,

1 Report of Indian Commissioner, 1874, p.

71.

2 A Political Problem: New Mexico and the Mexicans. By an Officer of the Army, p. 8.

as well as physical and animal humanity, would stoop to the grade of the wigwam. Dr. Ellis states it well:

-

"The red man and the white man on the frontiers have very often interlinked their lot and destiny, and merged all their differences. Hundreds of white men have been barbarized on this continent for each single red man that has been civilized. The whites have assimilated all the traits and qualities of the savage, and mastered his resources in war and hunting, and his shifts for living, in tricks, in subtlety, and cruelty.1

I found it a proverb on the plains and in the mountains that it takes six years to make an Indian into a white man, but six weeks to make a white man into an Indian.

The fears of Washington Irving and of Commodore Wilkes were based on the progeny of the degenerated white man and the Indian savage whom he had debased. "It is to be feared that a great part of this desert will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean and the deserts of Arabia, and, like them, be subject to the depredations of the marauders. . . . Some [of its half-breed races] may gradually become pastoral hordes, like those rude and migratory people, half shepherd and half nomad, who, with their flocks and herds, roam the plains of Upper Asia. But others, it is to be apprehended, will become predatory hordes, mounted upon the fleet steeds of the prairies, with the open plains for their marauding grounds, and the mountains for their retreats and lurkingplaces." 2

"It seems

Commodore Wilkes had similar forebodings. probable that, in a few years, all that formerly gave life to the country, both the hunter and his prey, will become extinct, and that their place will be supplied by a thin white and half-breed population, scattered along the few fertile valleys, supported by pasture instead of the chase, and gradually degenerating into barbarism, far more offensive than that of the savage which degrades the backwoodsman.” 8

error as to the future of our the qualities of the half-breed Civilizing forces have averted

Irving and Wilkes were both in interior, while they judged well of and border white men of their day. the perils which they foresaw to the extent to which we have been

civil and Christian missionaries.

1 The Red Man and the White Man, by George E. Ellis, p. 364.

2 Astoria, chap. xxii.

8 Wilkes' Exploring Expedition, vol. iv.

And this recalls the defense of John Smith, of the Virginia colony, when blamed by his company for not making greater progress in civilizing and Christianizing the Indians: "Much they blamed me for not converting the savages, when those they sent us were little better, if not worse." Lord Bacon, very like, had the Jamestown colony in view, for he was contemporary with its founding, when he wrote: "It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked, condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant; and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation; for they will ever live like rogues, and not fall to work, but be lazy, and do mischief, and spend victuals, and be quickly weary, and then certify over to their country to the discredit of the plantation." It is not fairly acknowledged, even if understood, that the greatest obstacle to the civilization of the Indian is his uncivilized and decivilized white neighbor. All our history shows this, from the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies down to the last telegram of Indian violence on the frontier.

Judge Burnet, speaking of what he had seen in the Northwest Territory, between Marietta and Detroit, says: "In the short period of half a century the condition of the Indian has been so changed that scarcely a trace remains of what they were when their country was first entered by the pioneers of our race, — an event which sealed their destiny." 2

Here, therefore, is a phase of the Indian Question which will force itself more and more on the attention, as we struggle along and find more difficulties than methods of solution. Many may be surprised to discover to what a percentage in race mixture it is a white man's question. Therein the misfortune is that the admixture and lineage are so much of inferior white blood, since in working the sociological problem the laws of heredity are to be resisted and overcome. Then we are not so far along in civilization as to be able to give the elements and qualities of true manhood preeminence over what is merely incidental and accidental, and along which race lines run, and demark man from man.

As the observing traveler drops into the thoroughfares anywhere beyond the Mississippi, he soon finds himself among the bleached and the browned, till races are obscured, and he brings himself unconsciously to taking his fellow-travelers on quality, and not shades of color or facial structures. The wider one 1 Essays: of Plantations.

2 Notes on the Early Settlement of the Northwest Territory, by Jacob Burnet, p. 392.

ranges on our latitudes and longitudes west of the Alleghanies, the more deeply the conviction takes him that we are building a nation, not only in a new world, and under a new system of government, but with a new people. While we take in the enterprising and energetic from all the old world, we are forming a new people or race, as distinct as were the Aryans, or Romans, or Scandinavians. We are no longer English; that expresses but one of our polygenous ingredients. We are Americans.

READING, MASS.

William Barrows.

THE OVER-ESTIMATION OF GOETHE.

WHEN it is related of Professor Bonamy Price that he "refused to read the works of a great modern writer whose character he disapproved," when we find him saying, "I can't read them," "with a curious mixture," we are told, "of obstinacy and penitence," we have little doubt, in the absence of knowledge, what writer is meant. There is, we should say, but one, in whose regard the worse has so sedulously been made the better reason, that the "curious mixture of obstinacy and penitence" points to him infallibly.

Schopenhauer somewhere rails at "those rogues" who, "because a great genius discloses to them the treasures of his mind,

consider themselves entitled to hale his moral personality before their judgment-seat," a railing, we may remark in passing, natural to a man who could acknowledge to a sister his dishonorable intentions toward a woman whom there was nothing against his marrying if he would. And admirers and disciples of Schopenhauer are not wanting to assure us that we have no right to interpret the works of a man of genius by his life, if indeed they do not hold Schopenhauer's view that a genius has a right to a certain modicum of cakes and ale in the way of license prohibited to his fellow-men, by virtue of the benefit his genius confers upon them. Schopenhauer's doctrine, stated baldly, is too large for the average attainment. This is shown, we think, by the zeal with which Goethe-worshipers find a moral in the most unmoral, to put it mildly, of writers, the zeal with which they set up a special standard, to which ordinary standards must be subordinate, for his character and conduct. The doctrine is there, however;