to impart and extend it. Cannot civilization civilize? If it be a severely hard task to impart civilization to a wild race, let us remember what a constant struggle and effort, with all ingenious and complicated appliances, are needed in order that we may keep our civilization. A civilized community, apprehending its fearful risks and perils, does not grudge the task and toil, the watchfulness and the anxiety needful to perpetuate it. Is it much harder to increase and extend it than it is to preserve what we have? Nor must we be disheartened or borne down by the tone of ridicule which may be used in the way of presenting our own Government with all grave tasks of administration for our own people, in its home and foreign relations, as assuming the training and educating in all forms of industry of a horde of savages. There will be more loss of honor and dignity to our country — vastly more of demoralization and peril — to be risked in looking on, even indifferently and without actually aiding in the process, as an aboriginal race comes to extinction before our eyes.
The opportunities, inducements, and facilities which have been offered to the Indian for accepting civilization, and which have always so pointedly failed to win him to it, deserve notice here, for they have much significance. When a group of wild chieftains and braves from the forests or the Western plains has been guided through our civilized country to hold a talk with the President at Washington and to be made spectacles of in our cities, they may well have been dazed, confounded, appalled, by the full significance of civilization, and utterly bereft of any sense of capacity or desire for what is so hopelessly out of their reach, so contrasted with their own rude ways. The panting steamer, the thundering locomotive by which they make stages of their route, the ingenious, complicated, and cumbrous devices of the white man, his refined habits of dress and eating, the noisy pavements, the crowded shops and ware-houses, the thick throng of the streets, the varied in-
