I wish it were possible for me to give you some idea of the amount of suffering and misery there is in India to-day; but I fear that I can not do it, for you have seldom been where you could not obtain the services of a good physician in time of need, or even be taken to a hospital, if it were desirable. But there are millions of people in India who have no such resources as that. Shall I tell you of a man who came to our hospital some time ago suffering from a cataract in one eye? He was an intelligent man, well educated, and he wanted to save his eyesight. He employed some of the native doctors to treat the eye, and when he came to us he said that he thought he had had at least twenty-five pounds of medicine put in his eye. That sounded like such a large story that we asked for the particulars, and I think he was about right. It was all to no purpose, however, so that he changed doctors and got a new remedy that was guaranteed. They opened his eye and sifted it full of pounded glass. If you have ever had a cinder in your eye, perhaps you can to some small extent imagine the agonies which that man endured before he came to us. That is not an uncommon case, and frequently when I go into the dispensary in the morning I find there mothers with their little children. They hold them out to me in their arms and say, "Won't you look at this child's eyes?" I say, "Well, mother, what is the matter with the eyes?" "Oh, about two or three weeks ago the child's eyes were red and it cried a little bit, and we tried to open them to see what was the matter, but the child made so much fuss we couldn't do anything. Now, they have been shut so long that we are afraid there is something the matter; we want you to look and see." I open those eyelids with my fingers; I know what I am going to see. The front part of the eyeball is gone—sloughed away, rotted out just in those few days. A few simple remedies, a little cleanliness at the proper time, would have saved those eyes, but often I have to say to those mothers, "Your child is blind for life." There are many thousands of such little children in India to-day sitting by the side of the road waiting for the coppers which the passer-by will fling to them, and which they must find by feeling around in the dust. It is a very common practise on the part of the native physicians to apply as a counter-irritant to the surface of the body a material which burns like a red-hot iron; and if you have burned your finger recently, you can imagine how it would be to be burned in stripes from the nape of your neck right down to your heels, or to have patterns worked on your body with that fiery material. If you have suffered recently from such a simple ailment as a toothache, imagine a land without any dentists or other means to relieve that ache. The tooth must ache in India, until nature brings its own remedy, and the tooth drops out.—A. S. Wilson, "Student Volunteer Movement," 1906.
(1578)
Indian, The—See Conservation.
Indian, The Word of an—See Promise,
an Indian's.
INDIANS, AMERICAN
"The 'noble' red man of traditional lore was usually a very low-bred, dirty savage, uninteresting except for his blood-thirstiness and capacity for rum and mischief." What education, mostly under government supervision, has been able to do with the Indian is shown in the extract:
Supt. Friedman of the Carlisle Indian
School remarks that thirty years have elapsed
since the first group of eighty-two Sioux
Indians from the Pine Ridge and Rosebud
Reservations of South Dakota arrived at
Carlisle, Penn., to receive the benefit of a
civilized education. Out of this beginning
an elaborate system of Indian schools has
grown, including 167 day-schools, 88 reservation
boarding schools and 26 non-reservation
schools, so that to-day 25,777 Indian
students are being educated under the Government's
immediate patronage, at a cost for
the fiscal year 1909 of $4,008,825. The students
in the contract schools and missions
swell this total to 30,630. The Carlisle school,
the largest of all, has an enrolment of 1,132,
which is not much below the enrolment of
Princeton College.—New York Times.
(1579)
Indians' Receptiveness to the Gospel—See Father, Our.
INDICATOR, AN INSECT
One of the simplest of barometers is a
spider's web. When there is a prospect of
rain or wind the spider shortens the filaments
from which its web is suspended and
leaves things in this state as long as the
