and settle down peaceably in one place, so that he could preach Christianity to them at his ease; he even proposed that they should be forcibly bound down to a less migratory life. If this pious man, who thought of nothing but the advancement of the Kingdom of God, had been living now, he might in so far have been happy; for the Christian Greenlanders of to-day scarcely travel at all. By reason of the great impoverishment which we have brought upon them, there are every day fewer and fewer hunters who can procure enough skins to make a woman-boat and a tent, both of which are of course necessary for travelling. They are more and more forced to pass the whole year round in the unwholesome winter houses, which are, of course, mere hot-beds for bacteria and all sorts of contagious diseases, while the men are thus unable to change their hunting-grounds, and must keep to the same spots year out year in. By this means the 'take' is of course greatly diminished, food is consequently much less plentiful, and the indispensable sealskins become fewer and fewer. As soon as the whole Greenland community has sunk to the level of Egede's ideal and has entirely abandoned its migratory habits, it will be almost, if not quite, beyond salvation. The decline in this direction has of late years been very alarming.
