he bureau,
signs which are very welcome to those connected with the missions. For
the best interest of the native demands that the two agencies at work
for his good work heartily and sympathetically together. The missions
can do without the government--did do without it for many years, though
glad of the government's aid in carrying the burden of the schools--but
the government cannot do without the missions; and if the missions were
forced to the re-establishment of their own schools, there would be
empty benches in the schools of the government.

[Sidenote: THE THREAT OF EXTINCTION]

That the Indian race of interior Alaska is threatened with extinction,
there is unhappily little room to doubt; and that the threat may be
averted is the hope and labour of the missionaries amongst them. At most
places where vital statistics are kept the death-rate exceeds the
birth-rate, though it is sometimes very difficult to secure accurate
statistics and to be sure that they always cover the same ground. The
natives wander; within certain territorial limits they wander widely.
Whenever a child is born it is certain that if it lives long enough it
will be brought to a mission to be baptized, but a death often occurs at
some isolated camp that is not reported till long after, and may escape
registration altogether.

Certain diseases that have played havoc in the past are not much feared
now. For the last seven years supplies of the diphtheritic antitoxin
have been kept at all the missions of the Episcopal Church, and in the
summer of 1911, when there was an outbreak of smallpox at Porcupine
River, almost every Indian of interior Alaska was vaccinated, mainly by
the mission staffs. Diphtheria has been a dreadful scourge. The valley
of the upper Kuskokwim was almost depopulated by it in 1906. A disease
resembling measles took half the population of the lower Yukon villages
in 1900. In the last few years there have been no serious epidemics; but
epidemic disease does not constitute the chief danger that threatens the
native.

[Sidenote: DWELLING AND CLOTHING]

That chief danger looms from two things: tuberculosis and whisky.
Whether tuberculosis is a disease indigenous to these parts, or whether
it was introduced with the white man, has been disputed and would be
difficult of determination. Probably it was always present amongst the
natives; the old ones declare that it was; but the changed conditions of
their lives have certainly m