tented. But
these California Indians, at the best, were far inferior to those of
the East. "When attached to the mission," Mr. Soule says, "they were
an industrious, contented, and numerous class, though, indeed, in
intelligence and manly spirit they were little better than the beasts,
after all."

The Jesuit Father, Venegas, remarks, discouragingly: "It is not easy
for Europeans who were never out of their own country to conceive an
adequate idea of these people. Even in the least frequented quarters
of the globe there is not a nation so stupid, of such contracted ideas,
and weak, both in body and in mind, as the unhappy Californians. Their
characteristics are stupidity and insensibility, want of knowledge and
reflection, inconstancy, impetuosity, and blindness of appetite,
excessive sloth, abhorrence of all fatigue of every kind, however
trifling or brutal,--in fine, a most wretched want of everything which
constitutes the real man and makes him rational, inventive, tractable,
and useful to himself and others." All of which goes to show that
climate is not everything, and that contact with other minds and other
people, with the sifting that rigorous conditions enforce, may outweigh
all the advantages of the fairest climate. The highest development
comes with the fewest barriers to migration, to competition, and to the
spread of ideas.

The destruction of the missions and the advent of our Anglo-Saxon
freedom has been for the Indian and his kind only loss and wrong. He
has become an alien and tramp, with his half-brother, the despised
Greaser.

The mission fathers left no place for idleness on the part of their
converts, or "neophytes"; nor did they make much provision for the
development of the individual. The Indians were to work, and to work
hard and steadily, for the glory of the church and the prosperity of
the nation. In return they were insured from all harm in this world
and in the world to come. The rule of the Padre was often severe,
sometimes cruel, but not demoralizing, and the Indians reached a higher
grade of industry and civilization than the same race has attained
otherwise before or since.

Believing that the use of the rod was necessary to the Indians'
salvation, the Padres were in no danger of sparing it, and thus
spoiling their children. The good Father Serra would as "soon have
doubted his right to breathe as his right to flog the Indian converts";
and meek and quiet though these c