If I startle the readers, let them reflect for a moment upon what perhaps some of them have never yet exactly appreciated—that a man, to know how his own house looks, must see how the houses of others appear. To know how his own city and country actually look, and how his countrymen act and live, he should see how cities and countries look, and how people act, in other parts of the world. If he will do this, and then leave all civilized countries a while, and the din and clatter, and the struggles for wealth amidst the rags and vices of the community he has lived in, and taste for a time the simple, silent life of the wilderness, he will find, on returning to his home, that he has been raised amongst a variety of vices and follies which he never before had duly appreciated, and will then realise, to a certain degree, the view which the savages take of the scenes in civilized life when they look into the strange medley of human existence in our great towns and cities, where all the contrasts are before their eyes, of rich and poor, equally struggling for wealth or the means of existence.
With such eyes were those wild people here to look; and without the cares and hourly and momentary concerns which lead the scrambling, busy world through and across the streets, blinded to what is about them, the poor but entirely independent Indians were daily and hourly scanning from the top of their buss, or the platform of their exhibition-rooms, the scenes, and manners, and expressions that were about them; and though they looked with unenlightened eyes, they saw and correctly appreciated many things in London and Paris which the eyes of Londoners and Parisians scarcely see. They saw their sights and got their estimates and statistics, and in the leisure of their inquisitive and abstracted minds drew deductions which few of the business world have leisure or inclination to make; and with all of these they have gone back to be the illustrators and teachers of civilization in the wilderness.
Each one will be a verbal chronicler, as long as he lives, of the events and scenes he witnessed while abroad, and Wash-ka-mon-ya (or Jim), with his smattering of civilization, and his book of entries, which he will find enough to read and translate, will furnish abundance of written evidence for them to comment upon to their nation, who will be looking to them for information of the secret of civilization.
The bazaar of toys and trinkets presented to them, with the money and medals which they will open to view in the wilderness, will glitter in the eyes of their people, and, it is to be feared, may be an inducement to others to follow their example. œ Their Bibles had increased in their various boxes since the last census to more than a hundred and fifty; their religious tracts, which they could not read, to some thousands; their dolls, in all, to fifty; and other useless toys, to a great number. Then came their medals, their grosses of buttons, their beads, ribbons, brooches, fans, knives, daggers, combs, pistols, shawls, blankets, handkerchiefs, canes, umbrellas, beaver hats, caps, coats, bracelets, pins, eye-glasses, &c. &c.; and then their prints—views of countries they had seen, of churches, cathedrals, maps of London and Paris, views of bridges, of factories, of coal-pits, of catacombs, of Morgues, &c. &c., to an almost countless number, all to be opened and commented upon, and then scattered, as the first indications of civilization, in the wilderness. These are but mere toys, however, but gewgaws that will be met as matters of course, and soon used up and lost sight of. But Jim’s book of the statistics of London, of Paris, and New York, will stand the Magna Charta of his nation, and around it will assemble the wiseacres of the tribe, descanting on and seeking for a solution of the blessings of civilization, as the passing pipe sends off its curling fumes, to future ages, over its astounding and marvellous estimates of civilized nations, of cities, of churches, of courts of justice, and gaols—of the tens of thousands of civilized people who are in it recorded (to their amazement) as blind, as deaf and dumb, and insane; of gallows and guillotines, of massacres and robberies, the number of grog-shops and breweries, of coal-pits, of tread-mills and foundling hospitals, of poorhouses and paupers, of beggars and starvation, of brothels, of prisons for debtors, of rapes, of bigamy, of taxation, of game-laws, of Christianity, of drunkenness, of national debt and repudiation.
The estimates of all these subjects have gone to the wilderness, with what the eyes of the Indians saw of the poverty and distress of the civilized world, to be taught to the untaught, and hereafter to be arrayed, if they choose, against the teachings of civilization and Christianity in the Indian communities: a table of the enormous numbers in the civilized world who by their own folly or wickedness drag through lives of pain and misery, leaving their Indian critics, in the richness of their imaginations, to judge of the immense proportion of the enlightened world who, in just retribution, must perish for their crimes and their follies; and in their ignorance, and the violence of their prejudices, to imagine what proportion of them are actually indulged in the comforts of this life, or destined to enjoy the happiness of the world to come.
Teaching, I have always thought, should be gradual, and but one thing (or at most but few things) taught at a time. By all who know me and my views, I am known to be, as I am, an advocate of civilization; but of civilization, as it has generally been taught amongst the American Indians, I have a poor opinion; and of the plan I am now treating of, of sending parties to foreign countries to see all that can be seen and learned in civilized life, I have a still poorer opinion, being fully convinced that they learn too much for useful teachers in their own country. The strides that they thus take are too great and too sudden for the slow and gradual steps that can alone bring man from a savage to a civilized state. They require absolutely the reverse of what they will learn from such teachers. They should, with all their natural prejudices against civilized man, be held in ignorance of the actual crime, dissipation, and poverty that belong to the enlightened world, until the honest pioneer, in his simple life, with his plough and his hoe, can wile them into the mode of raising the necessaries of life, which are the first steps from savage to civil, and which they will only take when their prejudices against white men are broken down, which is most effectually done by teaching them the modes of raising their food and acquiring property. I therefore am constrained to give judgment here against the propriety of parties of Indians visiting foreign countries with a view to enlightening their people when they go back; and here also to register my opinion, for which I am daily asked, as to the effects which these visits to Europe will have upon the parties who have been abroad, and what impressions they will make amongst their people when they return.
I am sure they saw many things which pleased them and gained their highest admiration, and which they might be benefited by seeing; and also that they saw many others which it would have been decidedly better they had never seen. They have witnessed and appreciated the virtues and blessings, and at the same time the vices and miseries and degradations of civilized life, the latter of which will doubtless have made the deepest impressions upon their minds, and which (not unlike some more distinguished travellers than themselves) they will comment and enlarge upon, and about in equal justice to the nation they represent and are endeavouring to instruct.
Their tour of a year or two abroad, amidst the mazes and mysteries of civilized life, will rest in their minds like a romantic dream, not to be forgotten, nor to be dreamed over again; their lives too short to aspire to what they have seen to approve, and their own humble sphere in their native wilds so decidedly preferable to the parts of civilized life which they did not admire, that they will probably convert the little money they have made, and their medals and trinkets, into whisky and rum, and drown out, if possible, the puzzling enigma, which, with arguments, the poor fellows have found it more difficult to solve.
With this chapter I take leave of my Indian friends; and as the main subject of this work ends with their mission to Europe, the reader finds himself near the end of his task.
In taking leave of my red friends, I will be pardoned for repeating what I have before said, that on this side of the Atlantic they invariably did the best they could do; and that, loving them still as I have done, I shall continue to do for them and their race, all the justice that shall be in the power of my future strength to do.