GENERAL NOTES.
The Negro.
—Howard University, for colored students, Washington, D. C., shows a strength of two hundred and twenty-five in all departments. There are thirty-two theological students, fifty medical, six law, twenty-two academical, eighteen preparatory, and ninety-five in the Normal department.
—The Reformed Episcopal Church has organized fourteen colored congregations in and around Charleston, S. C. Some of them meet in log buildings. One church is staggering under a debt of ten dollars.
—The Baltimore Annual Conference of the A. M. E. Church passed resolutions denouncing the action of the School Commissioners of that city, in refusing to employ colored teachers for the separate schools for colored children. Two colored delegates, representing the African Methodist Church, were most cordially received.
—Prof. Bennett, of Nashville, makes an important contribution to the question of negro mortality, in the Independent. He sums up the causes of its large percentage: (1) The old and sick, broken by slavery, are dying as the effect of former hardships; (2) they lack vital force, are scrofulous, and readily succumb to disease; (3) ignorance of the laws of health; (4) late and excited religious meetings; (5) inadequate clothing and food; (6) crowded tenement house life. He also names the following grounds for expecting an improvement: (1) They are gradually improving their condition, as to homes, food and clothing; (2) they are progressing in intelligence and knowledge of the laws of health; (3) the younger ministers are leading them to earlier hours and quieter modes of worship; (4) boards of health are securing better sanitary conditions.
—The first negro who has sat on an important jury in New York, in many years, was accepted May 22d, in the Supreme Court circuit, in a case involving $6,500.
—Should the barque Azor make four trips a year, it would take one hundred years to transport to Africa the 100,000 now ready to go, and able and willing to pay $20 each for passage and food. It is most important that the 99,000, at least, should neither give up home nor work.
—A French Roman Catholic mission is to be established at Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, in Central Africa, with government aid to the amount of $20,000. Ten missionaries, who have seen service in Northern Africa, will soon set out for Zanzibar. They have already large and extending missionary enterprises in the north and in the south.
The Indian.
—It is hard to tell, from the contradictory accounts, whether Sitting Bull will continue seated over the Canada lines, trading in the spoils of raids on Black Hills trains, or will issue from his camp of 1,500 lodges to take possession of his old home and fight out his claim to the end. Authorities differ.
—Meanwhile, the Bannock Indians, numbering about 200 warriors, under the command of Buffalo Horn, the noted scout, are encamped in the lava beds, between Big Campus Prairie and Snake River, and have ordered the whites to leave the prairie on penalty of death. The Indians on the Upper Columbia are equally hostile, and the Sioux still threatening.
—General Sherman says that, if the present indications of an Indian war are realized, and he fears they will be, the army, as it now stands, would be entirely insufficient to cope with the weight of Indian strategy and valor that would be thrown against it.
—The Commissioner of Indian Affairs is about to try a new experiment with the Indians. He has given orders forbidding further gratuitous issue of coffee and sugar to them at their agencies. In order to secure application to duty on their part, he says that only as they work, and in payment for their labor, will they receive coffee and sugar rations in future.
—The Tribune says: “The Senate will certainly raise the army to 25,000 men, and concur in the transfer of the Indian Bureau to the War Department. The first will almost certainly be yielded by the House in Conference Committee, and the other has already received its approval.” The same paper contains this paragraph, also: “Before the Indian Bureau is transferred from the Interior to the War Department, however, Congress should strive to comprehend the fact that even the War Department can have very little success in managing Indian affairs unless we contrive to attain some settled Indian policy. We have been in the habit of putting the Indians by turns under the immediate care of missionaries and thieves, of Quakers and Catholics, of army officers and contractors. We have made solemn treaties, and broken them. We have moved them to reservations, and then crowded them off whenever they were found to be in the way. We have pauperized them by promising supplies, and starved them by breaking our promises. We have made a pretence of civilizing them, without furnishing them with any code of law, and of educating them, without furnishing them with any teachers. After supplying them with rifles to fight with, and worrying them into hostilities, we have made war upon them; and when they have proved so conspicuously cruel and treacherous as to deserve swift retribution, we have tried moral suasion. No one ever dreamed that the same tribe was to receive the same treatment for two successive years, and no two tribes ever received the same treatment at the same time. What is first needed is a definite and persistent policy of some kind, so that both Indians and white men will be able to form some clear idea of what will probably happen the day after to-morrow. A bad system is better than no system; any system is better than caprice.”
—A small Indian church was dedicated at Jamestown, Clallam County, Washington Territory, Sunday, May 12th, by Rev. M. Eells. The idea of erecting it originated entirely with the Indians, who bought the lumber, and have done all the work. The windows and casings, nails, paint, oil, and lime came as annuity goods. They have also had encouragement, pecuniarily, from white friends. It is the first church building in the county, although it has been settled for about twenty years, and the first white house in the Indian village.