ion numerous illustrations showing that it is impossible to
do any work that is required immediately, through this Indian Bureau. If
people are starving, you cannot get food for them until they die.

Now, what is the remedy? I believe that Christianity is the only
remedy--the only solution of the Indian question. Where they have had
good Christian agents--and they have had some--where they have
missionaries, the Indian has made wonderful progress. I think we can
point to a few civilized and Christianized communities among the Indians
that can find no parallel among the whites of the country. There is less
crime, less immorality, more faithfulness to the requirements of the
Christian religion and better observance of the Sabbath, more sincerity
and earnestness in the performance of every Christian duty, than we can
find in the same number of whites anywhere. At Metlakatla, as told by
Mr. Duncan, the Indians now form a community of twelve hundred people,
who have their churches, their stores, their town-halls. They live in
houses, like other people; they appear like civilized people; they carry
on all the vocations of civilized life; and all this has been done by
the work of one man. There is no liquor-drinking or liquor-selling
there. A majority of this twelve hundred people are earnest, faithful,
consistent Christians. They get no help from the Government. They have
built up and support their churches. Where can you see anything among
the whites that equals it?

Then there is another reason why we should go to them with the gospel of
Christ. It is a good thing to engage in works of charity and
benevolence, but before we do this we should pay our debts. We owe so
much to the Indians of this country, that I think before we go anywhere
else we should do something to atone for the years of wrong, for the
centuries of injury, that they have suffered at our hands. We have taken
their homes from them. We have driven them from reservation to
reservation. We have taken their crops when almost ready to reap. We
have removed them into climates where they have died by hundreds. We
have not listened to their cries. We have on various trumped-up charges
frequently slaughtered these people, and treated them in the most cruel
manner. There is no question that I know of that so holds a man, once
interested, and so grows upon him, as this Indian question.

I was first interested in this subject about ten years ago in the city
of Boston