tmosphere of overcrowded,
overheated cabins.

The missions help the Indians, especially the women and children, in
this matter of clothing as much as possible. Every year large bales of
good though left-off under and over wear are secured through church
organisations outside, and are traded to the natives at nominal prices,
usually for fish or game or a little labour in sawing wood. And this
naturally does not ingratiate missions with the trading class. One's
anger is aroused sometimes at seeing the cotton-flannel underclothes and
"cotton-filled" blankets and the "all-wool" cotton coats and trousers
which they pay high prices for at the stores. The Canadian Indians, who
are their neighbours, buy genuine Hudson Bay blankets and other real
woollen goods, but the Alaskan Indian can buy nothing but cotton.

But far and away beyond any other cause of the native decline stands the
curse of the country, whisky. Recognising by its long Indian experience
the consequences of forming liquor-drinking habits amongst the natives,
the government has forbidden under penalty the giving or selling of any
intoxicants to them. A few years ago a new law passed making such giving
or selling a felony. These laws are largely a dead letter.

[Sidenote: UNPAID COMMISSIONERS]

The country is a very large one, very sparsely populated; the distances
are enormous, the means of transportation entirely primitive, and the
police and legal machinery insufficient to the end of suppressing this
illicit traffic, especially in view of the fact that a considerable part
of the whole population does not look with favour upon any vigorous
attempt to suppress it. Great areas of the country are without
telegraphic communication, and in parts mail is received only once a
month. One stretch of two hundred and fifty miles of the Yukon receives
no mail at all during the winter months--more than half the year. In
that instance, as in many others, the country has gone distinctly
backward in the past few years. The magistrates--"commissioners" they
are called, receive no salary, but eke out a precarious and often
wretched existence on fees, so that it is frequently impossible to get
men of character and capacity to accept such offices.

One would have supposed that amongst all the legislating that has been
done for and about Alaska in the last year or two, one crying evil that
the attention of successive administrations has been called to for
twenty years past woul