of Eliot, Edwards
and Brainerd, and are earnestly serving Christ among these tribes.

A Christian civilization is wedging its way in until eighty thousand
Indians are now clothed in civilized dress. Forty thousand have
learned to read English, and nearly thirty thousand are living in
houses. There are forty thousand Indian children of school age, and
about fourteen thousand enrolled as pupils, leaving between twenty
and thirty thousand children for whom as yet there are no schools
provided. Sixty-eight tribes remain without a church, a school or a
missionary, absolutely destitute of Christian light.

It has been said that these heathen tribes are a vanishing people,
destined to decline and finally to disappear. Certainly their
condition for two hundred years has tended to decrease them, and yet,
when Columbus discovered America there were not double the number
that there are now. In happier conditions than formerly, there is a
decided increase in the Indian population, as there is betterment in
their customs and modes of life. Their missionary teachers find them
with the ancient characteristics unchanged--rude in thought, though
with a marked intellectual power. The open book of nature, the Indian
knows well. He will tell you the habits of bird and beast and tree
and plant. He will tell you the time of day by looking at a leaf. But
the life of civilization comes hard to him. He does not know the
value of time, nor the value of money. It is hard for him to measure
his days or to provide for the future, or to care for to-morrow. He
has not the heredity of civilization and Christianity, hence
missionary work sometimes seems slow in progress, but it is surely
gaining upon this almost dead past of half a century. Thirteen
Missionary Boards are now pressing forward to teach them the way and
the truth and the life.

The doors are wide open as never before. The hearts of the Indians
are friendly as never for two hundred years. If the majority of them
show as yet no deep desire for that which Christianity brings, they
are not, in this, dissimilar from other heathen. But this desire is
growing. The Government at last is seeking to redeem the past. It has
appropriated for the Indian tribes reservations larger, in square
miles, than the whole German Empire. The Republic of France must
re-annex considerable of its ancient possessions before it will own
as much land as is now the property of the Indians in the United
States. Unde