al joke than
as a serious pretension, but the point is--the Indians submitted.

So far as these natives of the interior are concerned they were never
idolaters. I cannot find that they had any distinct notion of worship at
all. Their religion had root in a certain frantic terror of the unknown,
and found expression in ceaseless efforts to propitiate the malign
spirits surrounding them on every side. Thus they were given over to the
mastery of those amongst them who had the traditional art of such
propitiation, and fell more or less completely under that cruellest and
most venal of sways, the tyranny of the witch-doctor. It is impossible
to doubt, and hard to exaggerate, the grinding and brutal exactions to
which this rule led. Anything that a man possessed might be demanded and
must be yielded, on pain of disease and death, even to the whole
season's catch of fur or the deflowering of a young daughter. The utmost
greed and lust that can disgrace humanity found its Indian expression in
the lives of some of these medicine-men.

Since every sort of tyranny has its vulnerable spot, since the despotism
of Russia was tempered by assassination and of Japan by the effect of
public suicide, so melioration of the tyranny of the medicine-man seems
to have been found in rivalry amongst members of the craft itself.
Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be
transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of
the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the
burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the
thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight
of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a fine point.

To such minds the Christian teaching comes with glad and one may say
instantaneous acceptance. Their attitude is entirely childlike. They are
anxious to be told more and more about it, to be told it over and over
again. There is never the slightest sign of incredulity. It does not
occur to them as possible that a man should be sent all this way to
them, should hunt them up and seek them out to tell it to them, unless
it were true. And one learns over again how universal is the appeal the
Christian religion, and in particular the Life of Our Lord, makes to
mankind. I have seen Indians and Esquimaux mixed, hearing for the first
time the details of the Passion, stirred to as great indignation as was
that barba