"We, who believe not in a capricious idol of power, but in a just Father, who loves-we, who hold that there is nothing which is not in God -cannot doubt the end." It is a beautiful thought that our best desires are but pictures of the things God means to give us, and so it is that I see in the wish nearest my heart to-night, the bold outline of a university, which, to use Dr. Mayo's words, shall be furnished with everything needful, without a flaw of sham education, from lofty turret to foundation stone, so well endowed, that for $200 a year a thousand students will throng its corridors, and no girl be kept out because of her poverty.

to

The great acquired and inherited fortunes will do this work in a way "blazon them with the gold of honor and brighten with tears of gratitude." And whenever, throughout this land, such a work is needed, do it, men and women of the North and South. I use the words North and South in a geographical sense only. They have no other meaning to us now. We are all simply Americans; the North is mine equally with the South; the South is yours equally with the North. There was a family row in the past, but it is settled now, and the boy in gray has come home to spend his days, the impulsive, hot-headed, large-hearted boy, youngest and well-beloved son of a fond mother, who floundered about in his little statesright boat till it went to pieces in the breakers. He returned as if awakened from a troubled dream, the blue sky and bright sunlight were above him, and the twittering birds in the trees about him. Putting his arms around his mother's neck, he said: "I will be a good boy, mother." Smoothing his disordered hair with her fair, soft hand, and wiping the tears from his eyes, she pressed upon his lips the kiss of peace and reconciliation. He has kept his word, and to-day there is no more loving or more loyal son in all the land than the boy in gray, way down South in Dixie.

Men of America, whether great or small, you are first among the nations. Setting foot upon our soil, for the first time in months, after a visit to another land, your manly courtesy, your tender, whole-souled reverence, made me feel that to be an American woman, was to wear the crown of queenhood in my own right. The courtly grace of the Frenchman, the profound gravity of the German, the wide culture of the Englishman, I remember with pleasure and gratitude, but the honest, wholeheartedness of the American gentleman, his broad, liberal thought, his nobility of soul, are a glory to the nation and an honor to all manhood. In the name of that nobility and for the sake of the woman whom you love, give the strength of your manhood to the upbuilding of such institutions for your daughters as will lend an added glory to our land. Some years ago, in conversation with one of our Tennessee University men, I said these words: "If I were eighteen years old to-morrow, I would knock at the door of the Tennessee University saying, 'Gentlemen, may I come in?' "' He answered: "If I were there I would say in reply, Come in Miss Clara, have a chair and make yourself perfectly at home."" He is not

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here in the flesh to-night, but others are, as large of soul and wide of vision. Make the spirit of his words your own, by removing every barrier that lies in the path of progress, by lending a strong, helping hand to the sister woman who knocks at the gate, by saying to her with the nobility and grace worthy of your American manhood: "O! woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee, even as thou wilt."

EDUCATION OF THE INDIAN.

GENERAL S. C. ARMSTRONG, of Hampton, Virginia, was introduced and spoke as follows:

For over a hundred years the Indian question has been a concern of this Nation. It has recognized its duties to these people. The result of it must be regarded as disappointing. Government can build bridges and railroads and custom-houses, but it cannot make men; it amounts to what has been fitly described as a century of dishonor. During the same time, the Christian philanthropy of this country has recognized the claims of the Indian in a noble, faithful, but comparatively quiet work during the century, the result of which has been far from appreciated. The Cherokees and other tribes of the Indian Territory and a portion of the Sioux and other of the Northern and Northwesterly tribes have been labored with most successfully. It is no time to detail these things now, but I wish to refer to the fact that this century has not been one of dishonor so far as the Christian education of the Indian has been concerned. The criticism on it has been that it has been limited, but its success has been assured. There are bright spots over all this Indian country to make proof of that, one of the brightest of which will be represented by Mr. Riggs, who will succeed me on this platform.

Wherever I go I find this question, Does it pay? To-day the majority of intelligent people of this country do not know whether it is worth while, and the great point that seems to be made is this, can the Indian be civilized, or, more properly, does the Indian stay civilized? What becomes of him when he is educated and returns to his own country? That question has only been answered effectually by workers across the Mississippi; the reports that come in the Missionary magazines few have read, and I have come to you, representing the Eastern work particularly, Carlisle as well as Hampton, to say that we bring nothing new, but simply repeat and affirm what has been proved by better men than we are in these past generations. We say this: that there is no difficulty in educating Indians. My own personal experience has covered only six years, but in that time it has been quite thorough. We have selected Indians from eight or ten different reservations, chiefly Sioux, brought them from the wild Northwest and the Southwest, thrown them into civilizing surroundings for about three years, giving about half the time to two studies, viz: the English language and industrial work, chiefly teaching them the trades, some attention being given to agriculture, but especially to the mechanic arts; giving the girls instruction in the art of making and sewing garments and cooking and household work, and teaching the young men eleven different trades, the most important of which is carpentering and blacksmithing and wheelwrighting and harnessmaking, work in leather and wood, which is the most important at their homes. As the result of this work we have sent back already one hundred who have had a three years' course or near that. Thirty returned so recently that it is not fair to claim much for them, though they are all in a hopeful way and at work, but some seventy returned over a year ago, commencing in 1881 and over a year and a half after that. There is an opportunity to speak fairly of the tendency of the Indian when he is educated and returns to the wild life on the reservations. To take an Indian or any other wild man from wild life, anybody but a degraded white man, anybody who has been in the midst of life and rejected it, those we do not claim to do much with, but for those who never knew the light, those who never fell because they had no place to fall from, there is great hope for them, and the work for these races, the Indian and Negro, is the most stimulating and hopeful of any on this continent, for the reason that those to whom light is first offered receive it with an earnestness that you, the teachers of the white race that live in the light, know little about. These seventy Indians who are a fair test of the work that has been done at Hampton

and Carlisle represent the practical, sensible method of manual labor. Of these seventy, all but seven have done fairly well. Only seven have gone back to the blanket, which means they put on the war paint, attend the war dances and live a lazy, camp life; not one of them has become a horse-thief or a renegade. I believe that the result of Indian education for the last five years will show that not one of them will do what some of our public men say they will all do, that is, take to the war path and murder. They have some of them relapsed, perhaps ten per cent. Aside from those who have relapsed, eight of them have died, and the others are doing fairly well, principally supported by the occupations that are given to them within the Indian reservation where the Government has its carpenters and blacksmiths, etc. That is the hope of the returned Indian under the supervision of the Government and under the supervision of the Indian agents, who employ a number of white men. Those white men are doing what the Indians should do; there is no difficulty with the Indian, they make the shoes and harness and all the things that are to be made in a perfectly satisfactory way, and they learn to manufacture at the Indian schools a great variety of things purchased by the Government for the Indian service, and they do it well. The result of educating Indians is that we find that Indians are very much like other people. With the same chance in the school they will do as well as whites, particularly in the mechanic arts, but when they return the tendency is to do as young white men do when they go into the unrestrained life of the West. The Indian is the victim of circumstances, as the rest of us are. The education of the Indian is very easy when we have the proper appli

ances.

Twenty-five thousand of the thirty thousand Indians to be educated must be educated on their reservations. The point of taking them to the schools in the East is that we are able to devote more money to the work and have better fitted establishments of every kind. On the other hand, this work at the East, I think it is fair to say, was inspired by Captain Pratt, that great tamer of man, a man who never went to school perhaps over two years in his whole life, who conceived that a band of red-handed prisoners of war might be improved; and the result of that noble effort on his part, unsustained by Government, unsympathized with by all, is the grand movement at the present time in connection with Indian education. Hampton came in and continued that work when no one else would lend a hand. On that basis he organized Carlisle, and the work at those schools has been an object lesson. People representing the education and the wealth of the country have come there from all parts, and there has been an object lesson in Indian civilization given to our people that has been a great thing for the cause. The work West and the work East has its special significance. That in the East has had the effect of building up that public sentiment which is at the bottom of any political movement or social movement in any civilized country. When they go back what happens to them, do they fall? I have given you the facts; why should it be so? simply this, if you can only give the returned Indian occupation, he will work. We have sent them right back there among those old tents and tepees, and those Indian boys went at once to the chief and said, "Let us have a house by ourselves." He promised to do it, and they got a cook and lived by themselves, out of the old camp life, and they were appointed to their duties of carpenter, blacksmith, or this or that, and they went to work. The gospel of hard work enters into this question very largely. Wherever they had plenty to do, wherever they had proper managenient on the part of the agents, they have not gone back to their old ways. Every effort that is put forth is a thing to be thankful for. The fault of the Indian policy is cheap men, cheap beef, cheap everything; that is the weak point in the Indian work. The sixty Indian agents are getting about $1200 a year. How are they to live on this $1200, which is only about twice the pay of a common laborer; how are they to make up this amount? They are almost forced to steal. The Indian agent is the only white man the Indian knows; he calls him father; he stands to the Indian as the embodiment of civilization; let him be fine and high and the Indian will move on. To one who has visited the agencies the difference in the Indians is the difference in the condition of the agents. It is a question of money to some extent, but the Indian question, like all questions involving the progress of humanity, is a question of men. I have been at nearly all the Indian agencies in the country, and I came away from them all impressed with that one idea. Let the Indian agents be men, and this question will be settled. Whether it is dividing up the lands, or keeping out whiskey, or the matter of education, or giving them work, or this or that, the man there stands for everything, and where there is a good man the work is progressing. These people have got to be led and influenced. I dwell on this as that which, in my experience, is the most discouraging point, that our work at Hampton is one-half, and the easiest half, of the work for

the Indian. Is it possible to get good men in? We try to select good men, and by every influence get good men there; and rather than have them leave we help them. When the Roman Catholic, McLaughlin, was about to leave last winter in order to get a better salary, a protestant lady in Boston gave $400 to be added to his salary that he might be retained, and she never made better use of her money.

A wave of progress is moving across the continent at the rate of twenty miles a year. Unless vigorous action is taken the Indian will be wiped out. While this is true, and the Indian seems to be giving way on the one hand, there is the singular fact that these two hundred thousand Indians are keeping at bay our whole fifty millions of Anglo-Saxons, demanding that we shall feed them or they will fight. That anomaly exists, that rather than fight them we will feed them, and feeding them in this way is worse than flogging them. The old slaveholder was a gentle, tender master compared with the would-be politician who would vote food to put into their stomachs that cost them no sacrifice whatever. We have made by this feeding process manhood impossible, and that is the great crime we have committed against them.

What is the remedy for all this? We wish good men to take hold of this; that is about the upshot of the question. The trouble is not in the Indian or his surroundings so much as in legislation at our National Capitol; there is the difficulty; in our public men, most of them who mean well, but few of them are posted, and many of them are ignorant and indifferent. The indifference of Congress is the curse of the Indian. For the last two or three sessions of Congress there has been a great improvement; there has been a wonderful improvement in the ideas of our educators on the subject of the education of the Indians. When we look back at the way things were a few years ago there is reason to thank God and take courage. Washington is where the thing is to be done, and not on the plains. We must go back of the legislators; there is somebody to blame nearer home than that; it is you; you represent the people; it is the public sentiment which underlies every question in every civilized nation, and if the public sentiment were right, there would be no difficulty in Washington. The trouble is with the people; they do not care about the thing; it is the indifferentism of the people that makes the indifferentism and ignorance of Congress; that works this great negative wrong to the Indian, and keeps the doors of manhood and womanhood closed to them; but I think there is hope. About three centuries ago there came curiously in contact three races, the Negro, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Indian. On the banks of the James River, a few miles from the town of Hampton, that germ of English life, with others planted along our coast, has expanded into a population of over fifty million, the destiny of whom it is to become the teachers of the race, and you have a big job on hand. We can hardly ask your attention from that to the comparatively small concerns of the red and the black races, but it is interesting to note how the five hundred thousand who were brought from the African coasts in the slave ships and landed on the shores of America have increased to six millions, and are multiplying faster than any other race on earth. Those people brought here in slavery while under the lash learned our language, acquired our industrial habits, and embraced the Christian faith. All these three were equally imperfect, but all were tremendous forward movements in the hand of God, who overrules the wrath of man and makes it praise Him. There was no grander move, morally, in the history of man than that of American slavery, paralleled only by that of the Children of Israel, and for the same motive and in the same direction. We have not yet learned to look at that thing rightly. When we get cooler and calmer we will see it. Experience has given me these views. The Indian, on the other hand, has neither our language nor our labor habits, nor our industry, nor our religion. The Rappahoes and the Sioux, tens of thousands, are just as far from our religion as the people of China. It is one of the startling things in American life that there were probably three hundred thousand of these people at the time our forefathers landed, and to-day about two hundred and sixty-two thousand. Dying out, you may say. Yes, the pure blood Indians are either holding their own or decreasing, but the half-bloods are increasing. here to stay. but not the full blood Indian. It will finally resolve itself into a curious question of Indians who are not Indians, but who have the legal rights of Indians. They are a permanent factor whose form may be changed, but who will not be destroyed. With the negro, by the great factors of the surrounding influences of civilization, citizenship, and education, a result will be produced that will be a credit to our country; a grand thing for that race and the ultimate redemption of Africa, which was, under God, the moral objective of American slavery, I believe. The Indian wants just the same; he wants that surrounding influence of civilization, which is the first condition of progress that the negro has; he has it not. The red race seems to yield or die,

The Indian is