e of classification. You cannot find a flower
nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by
inverse ratio--the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird
you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion
on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.
How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of
Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska,
on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to
its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The
Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to
influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not
Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of
integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens?
The question sets us thinking.

The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as "Any irreligious, rude,
barbarous or unthinking class or person." This Eskimo is not
"irreligious," for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and
an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death,
and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,--"They
that are good shall be happy." He is not "rude," but exceedingly
courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.
"Unthinking" he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo
gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker
has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated
cobbler is your true philosopher.

There remains but the one ear-mark, "barbarous." The dictionary declares
that barbarous means, "not classical or pure," "showing ignorance of
arts and civilisation." On the first of these indictments our poor
Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare
pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to "arts" and
"civilisation." In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every
European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search
for a tag to put on my people is the term "civilisation." One is
reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:
"Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy." Was it not
Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, "I am conscious that life has
been trying to _civilise_ me for now seventy years with