The summary of recommendations, which are not new, but none the less worthy of consideration on that account, is as follows:
1st. Government of Indians by law.
2d. Division of reservation lands and homestead rights.
3d. Larger appropriations for the support of schools.
4th. Consolidation of agencies, and reduction of expense.
5th. Gradation of salaries on an equitable basis.
In view of the excellent results, and the greater promise of the peace policy, and of the imminent danger of the speedy transfer of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the War Department, it behooves every friend of the red man, who hopes for his ultimate civilization and citizenship, to bring every legitimate influence to bear upon our legislators to prevent the consummation of this scheme.
Reader, do you know the mind of your senator and representative upon this subject? If you do not, will you not find it out, and do all that you can to make him a minister of peace, and not of war, to these poor people?
KING DAVID AND KING SOLOMON.
The fourth article in Scribner’s, for April, is entitled “King David.” That regal personage proves to be only David King—a long, lank, awkward, shy, near-sighted Yankee, who, up among the New Hampshire hills, felt an inward call to go South and teach the blacks. He was a man not much missed from his old home, and not warmly welcomed at his new one. He was good, but not wise nor practical. The blacks came to him, young and old, in flocks, to learn to read, and he taught them morning, noon and night. But all the while the white planters “regarded the schoolmaster as an interloper, a fanatic, a knave or a fool, according to their various degrees of bitterness.” He tried the experiment of offering work to the idle blacks, but with little success. And now a Northern carpet-bagging politician, of the baser sort, came into his vicinity, and finding him an honest man, with some influence over the poor freedmen, set himself to overthrow it by offers of whiskey and promises of power. And poor David, innocent, and ignorant of human nature, makes weak and ineffectual fight with him, as he had before with haughty planters and ignorant negroes, yields the ground and goes home again, baffled and discouraged.
This charmingly told story has but one fault, and that, probably, is without intention. It may give the impression that King David is a fair sample of the Northern teachers in the South, and that his ill-success is the record or the prophecy of their general disaster and defeat. The true lesson of the story, and that which may have been, if any, in the writer’s mind, is only this: That this David was no Solomon. That goodness, unsupported by wisdom, is not sufficient capital for educational work. That a man who is a failure at home, amid favorable surroundings, will not be likely to succeed abroad, alone, with everything against him. That the lame, the halt and the blind do not make good recruits for the war against ignorance and sin.
Just to offset this story, which has doubtless had its counterpart in Southern as in Northern schools and villages, we give the story of one of our teachers in the State of South Carolina, as written to us by himself only a few months ago. Its simple, straight-forward truthfulness will, we think, make amends for its lack of the spiciness and crispness of expression, which give so delicate a literary flavor to the story of King David:
“I was born in Western New York, and, as all my friends continue to reside there, I still call it my home. I have been a member of the Household of Faith since 1859; I have been engaged in teaching the freedmen since the fall of 1866, and, for the greater part of the time, my salary has been quite small; but I love the work, and expect my reward hereafter.