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of a committee of the Board, it was believed that the work among those tribes had reached a point where it might properly be handed over to the Board of Home Missions. accordance with this conclusion a tender of these missions was made to the Home Board and accepted, subject to the approval of the General Assembly. The Assembly at Omaha having given its approval, the formal transfer will be made July 1. No part of the work among our American Indians has more deeply interested the Board of Foreign Missions than that in the Indian Territory. Indeed, it was here, in the days preceding the civil war, that the Board achieved its grandest results among the aborigines of this country. It is not, therefore, without reluctance that it severs its official connection with such a field and with brethren who have been counted among its most efficient laborers. In taking this step, however, the Board finds comfort in the thought that the work has been committed to a sister Board whose efforts in behalf of the American Indians give assurance in advance of a wise and zealous prosecution of the work.

MISSIONS TO THE CHINESE AND JAPANESE IN THIS COUNTRY.

SAN FRANCISCO: Mission begun, 1852; missionary laborers-Rev. Messrs. Augustus W. Loomis, D.D., and A. J. Kerr and their wives, and E. W.

Sturge, M.D., and wife; Miss Maggie Culbertson,

Miss E. R. Cable and Miss M. M. Baskin; three teachers in English; three other native helpers.

OAKLAND: Mission begun, 1877; two teachers; one native helper.

LOS ANGELES: Rev. I. M. Condit and wife; one native helper; two teachers in English. PORTLAND, Oregon: Rev. W. S. Holt and wife; one Bible-woman.

NEW YORK: One native teacher.

THE “ENGLISH" JACK O' LANTERN. "Teach the Indians English" is the cry nowadays. The advice is good so far as it goes. We would have the children study English, but for the purpose of helping them or their fathers and mothers toward heaven, an hour of their vernacular is worth a cycle of any other tongue. So it is for effective work in any efforts whatever to enlighten and elevate them. The truth is that few among us

have any adequate notion of what an operation it is for an Indian to learn English. The ideas of many persons on this subject are formed from what they have seen in a band of fifty or sixty chosen boys and girls in some one of the great Indian schools at the East, and very likely from ten or twelve of the brightest picked from this chosen fifty. And where do even these scholars come from? Most of them from mission schools on the far-off reservations, where they have already had their first roughness taken off, and been put fairly on the track of knowledge, not taught in English always, butwhich is half the battle-receiving the desires and the habits without which they could never have been taught anything. Years of work have been expended on many of them before they ever came east; years more are given to them here; and yet, in the majority even of these cases, let John P. Williamson or Albert Riggs step out and speak to the Sioux among them, for example, in their native tongue of the things of God, and the way in which they will lift up their heads, and the new intelligence and feeling and delight which will instantly flash from their eyes, will tell any spectator that these words are falling on their hearts, and that in comparison they have before heard nothing.

But turn from any question about these picked youth to the real question:-How

are we to deal with the thousands and scores of thousands of Indians too dull or too old ever to learn English? It is an absolute waste of time for religious purposes to attempt to teach them that enormously-difficult tongue. If they can spell out a letter or read a vote or get the little arithmetic needed to make a bargain, it is well, and we may be thankful; but if their seeing heaven depends on their understanding one single chapter of the Bible in the English, multitudes will die without the sight. And how absurd to make fifty or a hundred thousand savages all learn our tongue, instead of selecting a few of our brightest Caucasian minds, as we do in Africa, to master theirs, and then turn into it all needed wealth of truth!

"Oh, but we must Americanize them!"

it is said. Well, a very good stroke, none better, in Americanizing a raw Indian, is to teach him the Ten Commandments. What he needs is some American ideas thoroughly understood, not a few American words less than half understood. This, at any rate, is the way to begin with him. What an indescribable advantage it has been to the Sioux that our first missionaries proceeded on this principle, learned their language, reduced it to writing, put the whole Bible into it, the Catechism, Pilgrim's Progress, gave them Sioux spellingbooks and readers, told them in their own tongue what the really American ideas were, explained away their suspicions ten thousand times, set themselves, at least, right before their councils in days of robbery and wrong, and now publish for them in their own language a little monthly paper, adding every day to their stock of American news and ideas, to say nothing of Christian knowledge. What is the result? Two thousand of them gathered into the Christian church and twice that number civilized. Americanize them? A man who has become a good Presbyterian, has fenced a farm and makes a living from it, carries the baby to church instead of making his wife carry it, and takes even a monthly newspaper and pays for it, is a pretty good American already. An excellent start he has made so excellent that it will take some time for a large part of the American people to catch up with him. And he will not stop there. What he has learned in Dakota is the very thing to whet his appetite for the larger knowledge he can yet learn in English. He will be sure to learn it if it is in him, and at all events he will see that his children do.

That same process which has been witnessed among the Dakotas, or Sioux, ought to have been carried on in every Indian tribe. It is an occasion for deep and poignant regret that in the case of so many tribes precious years have been lost in the pursuit of such a fantasy as teaching these poor savages English, and insisting that they should learn everything else, even the way to heaven, through English. The

graves on every hill-top of our reservations of those who during the past fifty years have died in heathen ignorance, cry out against this insufferably slow and absurd procedure. They plead with every missionary on every Indian reservation to make haste and learn the Indian tongue, to learn it himself, and, if it has not been done, to reduce it to writing, and put into it without delay the vital rudiments, at least, of Christian knowledge. The fact that these tribes are in America instead of Africa does not alter the case one particle when we are dealing with the question how they can be most quickly and clearly taught the truth which it is death for them not to know. They are in Africa so far as the gospel is concerned until in their own tongue they hear and read of Christ. The fact that they are comparatively few in number, instead of numbering millions, does not alter the principles and methods of the case, although it has made our Christian young men too far forget them.

The whites around the Indians, and sometimes the missionaries among them, complain of the continued proclivity of the Indians for their dances and feasts. Even many of those on whom some Christian impressions seem to have been made, it is found, hanker at times after these scenes of half-savage and heathenish sport. But what in the world could we expect of these poor creatures? No one who has not been on an Indian reservation can easily conceive how monotonous and intolerably dull and uneventful life there is even for an Indian. He is deprived of all the old excitement of the hunt, the chase, the foray. Here, in the midst of miles where scarcely a rabbit hops across the trail, is a big, square stone building, where on ration days he or more likely his squaw-trudges and gets his raw beef, his beans and coffee, and then trudges back to his far-off log hut or tepee. There a wood-pile, a few rusty, dilapidated implements, and a few forlorn acres of corn field, in a hollow surrounded by bare and lonely hills, make up his environment. In the winter it is worse-one great, bleak stretch of stillness and death. Now, an Indian

may not be very intellectual, but after all he is a man, and even a dog would die of lonesomeness in such a life. One great trouble is that the Indian has nothing in the world to talk about, or even to think about. Any one can see that, although it would not be a remedy, it would be a wonderful alleviation of his lonesome life if he had something to read. It would take the place of the wild songs and stories with which the camp was once beguiled, and, religiously, it would supplement the visits of the missionary, who lives perhaps five or fifteen miles away, and has a whole tribe on his hands. The Indian's boys and girls come home from the mission school. Now, even if he cannot read himself, the children, provided there is some Indian book or paper at hand, can read to the old people, and whoever thinks that the father and mother will not listen, and will not listen with pride, simply does not know the Indian. As a preventative of his attendance on all sorts of wild gatherings, to look on scalp dances and listen to savage laments over the good old days of barbarism, mingled with fierce hopes of their return, few things would be better than to teach the Indian to read his own simple tongue; to give him a little stock of new ideas; to put into his hands those wonderful Bible stories and Christian parables whose charm has been felt by us all and by uncounted thousands of the rudest tribes in other lands; to give him also a little newspaper, which shall furnish him something to think about, and make him feel in some small degree, at least, the throb and movement of the world.

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plainly among the Omahas. This tribe appears to have been a favorite source of supply with these exhibitors. A very large proportion of the young men of the Omahas the larger part of them, our missionaries say-have at some time or other been connected with travelling shows. Several companies, numbering twelve or fifteen each, will sometimes be drawn off from the reservation in a single season. Mr. Barnum has had not a few of them connected with his exhibitions. It is very much to his credit that he and his agents have shown an anxiety to guard the Indians, while under their care, from demoralizing influences. Such influences could not be wholly kept from them; but the fact that no exhibitions were given on Sunday, and that the Indians came back reporting that they had been advised and helped to go to church, indicates a degree of conscientiousness on the part of Mr. Barnum's agents which has not always been attributed to them. The Indians were with some care protected from temptation and absolutely prohibited from all drinking and profanity.

There are other showmen, however, who have manifested no such scruples. Sunday exhibitions, wherever they could be held, have been common, and the Indians have returned to the reservations, after a tour of some months, addicted to profanity and drinking and thoroughly versed in the lowest forms of wickedness; in fact, corrupted through and through. A company who visited Paris came back less demoralized than many who have made the tour of America under unscrupulous managers. It is an illustration of the thoughtlessness-for it is sometimes more thoughtlessness than anything else with which the Indians are treated, that on any public holiday the little towns in the vicinity of the reservations will coax companies of Indians to visit them and give all sorts of exhibitions-feasts, races, dances. On a recent Fourth of July four towns on a reservation line were holding such exhibitions as a part of the regular attractions of the day, gotten up by reputable citizens. The effect on the Indians is very much what might be expected on

a lot of boys drawn off for days together from their homes to figure in a circus and make people gape by all sorts of grotesque and blood-curdling performances, and then turned loose, no one responsible for them, with their pockets full of silver, to spend it in saloons and in general vagrancy, dragging themselves home at last penniless and very likely polluted, to infect dozens of others with the same thriftless nonsense. Two or three missionaries on a reservation trying to elevate the Indians are no match for a cordon of towns engaged in spoiling them. Meantime the country is wondering why missions to the Indians seem to amount to so little.

THE CHINESE ON THE PACIFIC COAST.

REV. J. D. WELLS, D.D.,

President of the Board of Foreign Missions, who is now visiting the Pacific Coast.

The Chinese question has many sides. First thoughts and impressions regarding it are not likely to be fixed ones. A wise brother who has been on the coast several years cautions me not to be over-confident in writing on the subject, and I thank him for his counsel. The more I see and hear, the more I know there is to be learned before one can be sure of writing wisely. And when I say this, I make no reference to seeing the depths where Satan's seat is in China-town. I have no desire to look into those depths. I can find corresponding depths in any of our great cities of the East-a demonism as appalling and disgusting among peoples of other nations as among those from the land of Sinim. The first chapter of Romans will suffice as inspired testimony on the whole subject. It is to be regretted that so many who visit the Pacific coast see only the dark side of our imported paganism, and nothing, or almost nothing, of the blessed work done and doing for the saving of those whom God has

sent to our shores.

THE MISSION HOME.

I am glad to report that many young men of the Christian associations attending the convention in San Francisco visited the "Mission Home," under the care of Miss M. Culbertson, in which about forty young Chinese

women are sheltered and taught the truths of Christianity, and thought the sight better than any other they had seen on the coast. It is to be hoped that they will testify concerning this institution and all the work for saving Chinese men and women, at all the centres of influence from which they came. It is a shame that Christian visitors to San Francisco will pay a detective to conduct them through Chinatown, and believe what he and others like him may say of the Chinese, and take no pains to learn what the real friends of these people have to say about them and what they are doing for their salvation.

But all this is aside from the main object of my writing. It is well known that there are men and women here who say the Chinese must leave the country. Hoodlums say it. And there are some politicians who say it— hoping thus to win their way to office and its emoluments. But none of these represent the real sentiment of the coast. The Restriction Act is not the outcome of a sentiment like this.

CHINESE LABORERS A NECESSITY.

The ministers and others whom I have seen do not believe in unrestricted immigration. They think it would be unwise and dangerous to throw the Golden Gate wide open to the teeming millions of China. But, on the other hand, they do not believe in driving out those that are here. They are needed as laborers on railroads and farms, in mines and orchards and vineyards and laundries and homes. Already complaints are coming from orchardists and others that they are in danger of losing the fruits of the season because there are not laborers enough to gather them. No more reliable helpers can be found. They are industrious, quick to learn, patient, quiet, trustworthy. Wonderful are the burdens they bear. Men who are small of stature carry baskets of vegetables, suspended on long poles, weighing from two to four hundred pounds, and supply families in and out of the large cities. They are often insulted and grievously wronged, but endure the wrong and persist in the work.

ADVOCATING EXPULSION.

The readers of THE CHURCH AT HOME AND ABROAD do not need to be told that very ab

surd and sometimes contradictory reasons are given for driving the Chinese away; e. g., they send so much money out of the country; they work for very low wages; if they were gone, laboring men and women of other nationalities, and more akin to us, would have a better chance; they are pagans, and have no souls (some say this); or if they have souls, they can never be Christianized. An intelligent man seeking office made this last point in an earnest speech against the Chinese. He maintained that their paganism could never be overcome by Christianity, and that none of those confessing Christ were sincere. But with all his own advantages of birth and education in this Christian land, he was himself an unbeliever; and this was brought home to him by a courageous pastor on a public occasion and in a way that brought the blush to his face. I believe it is safe to say that those who deny the sincerity of the tried, professing Christians among the Chinese men and women are themselves uniformly without God in the world. Sure I am that no one who knows himself found and saved by the blessed Christ will doubt that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to any other sinner under the whole heavens to whom it comes by the will of God. Now and then the incredulity of fairminded men as to the conversion of the Chinese is overcome by what they see and know. A case in point has just come to my knowledge.

A family of wealth was about to vacate their beautiful house for the winter, and desired to have it occupied and cared for during their absence. The mother of the family, a Christian woman, having perfect confidence in a Christian Chinaman whom she knew, asked him to take charge of the house under full wages, as if the family were present, but of course having little work to do. Without a moment's hesitation he declined the offer, simply saying that he was going to China in the spring, and could not think of taking her money when he knew that she expected him to continue in service after the winter was gone. The gentleman of the family, somewhat incredulous as to the sincerity of Chinamen in confessing Christ as their Saviour, was convinced that this man, at least, was true to his confession.

DIFFICULTIES AND DISCOURAGEMENTS.

There are difficulties and discouragements in connection with the work for the Chinese on the coast and elsewhere. The churches outside of larger cities are struggling for selfexistence, and this work requires the expenditure of money; and even in the larger cities the struggle has not come to an end.

As far as I can learn, on the part of most pastors of evangelical churches, and Christian women at least, there is a recognition of the obligation to evangelize the pagan people who are brought to their doors. Perhaps Christian men are less earnest in feeling and effort. All believe in sending missionaries to China and Japan or to other pagan nations. They contribute of their means to do this. They have no doubt that the great commission of our risen Lord binds together the work and the benediction-the making disciples of all nations, gathering them into churches, teaching them to observe all things commanded themselves, and the fulfillment of the promise, "Lo I am with you all the days even unto the end of the age. Amen."

But I fear there is a sad lack of personal consecration to the hard work of teaching the Chinese, sitting down face to face with them, and helping them learn to read our language. Do you say they come to Sunday-school only for this? You are partly right, but greatly wrong. Even if this were all, it would not hinder the speaking of many a true and loving word for the Saviour; and in any case you would be in the way of duty, and would bind your grateful pupils to you with cords stronger than steel, and win for yourself the approval and the reward of the Master. The number of Chinamen who would come to Sundayschool and church could be indefinitely increased if godly men and women could be found to teach them.

I should add that the churches on this coast feel the need of larger co-operation on the part of the entire church through its appointed agencies, and they should have it.

There are little gatherings of Chinamen in night-schools here and there in California. They are taught gratuitously, and chiefly by faithful women. There is such a school at

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