To make the completest success of Eastern education for the Indians, I would use Carlisle as a sort of cleanser, a bath-tub or something of that kind, where we could wash them, clean them up, get a little understanding of our ways into them, and some understanding of English, and then scatter them out over the country to come in contact with our life. In that way they would learn best how to become citizens of the United States.
But we can rest it here. Whenever Congress gets ready to educate the Indian children as a whole, it will be no difficult matter to determine upon the best methods. Three to five thousand scattered around through the East would still leave forty-five to forty-seven thousand for the agency schools to work upon. That number in schools through the East, just as your Association proposes, sending them into your mission schools, where they may learn right from our life by comparison with theirs, by daily contact, will be found to be the most rapid plan. Make them work, and do not forget to make them fill their places, which they will gladly do when they find they must.
THE CHINESE.
REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.
Although in the Report of your Committee very brief mention is made of the work among the Chinese of this country, it is not therefore to be inferred that that work is being neglected, nor that it is failing in the ends for which it was undertaken. Rather is there a deepened conviction of its importance and increased encouragement in the prosecution of it; but in estimating the importance of the work we are not to consider alone the Chinese in this country, though they are a body of men of sufficient number to call for all, and more than all, that has been done for them. But we look beyond the 75,000 Chinese in California to the 400,000,000 in their own land. The Christian world through their missionaries, and by personal intercourse, are coming to understand this people better than they once did. Instead of the race of barbarians, stupid and immovable, which they were once thought to be, those who are well-informed accept the assertion of the Rev. John Ross, who says, “They are beyond comparison the most intelligent of non-Christian peoples; if any race surpasses them in industry, it is only the Anglo-Saxon.” * * * * *
But how is the Christian church to have a part in remodeling the institutions and customs of that vast nation? Not by any one method alone, but one of those which Providence has opened, is doubtless to be through the agency of Chinamen converted here and returning to their homes to preach the Gospel to their countrymen. It cannot be questioned that there will be a place and need for those trained under the institutions of the Gospel to go to China and plant the same institutions there; yet the converted Chinamen can do some things and exert an influence in some directions not open to others.
The career of Yung Wing furnishes a striking illustration of this. Of humble parentage, converted while at school in this country, he conceived the plan of bringing Chinese youth of promise to this country to be educated. He returned to China in 1855, without money, without influential friends, having almost forgotten his own language. For sixteen years he studied, taught, served the government, worked his way upward, and won to his views officers high in authority. In 1871 his plan was adopted by the government, $1,500,000 placed at his disposal, and more than 100 selected Chinese youth were brought to this country. Though his experiment has now received a check, and perhaps will not be carried on further, even its success so far is a standing proof of influence exerted by a Christianized native such as no other could hope to exert. And not only so, it has by no means been a failure even in itself considered. The young men who have gone back to China from our colleges and schools and Christian families have gone back far other than they came.
It is even a question whether they may not be more to be feared by the Chinese government as revolutionists than as though they had returned thoroughly converted Christians. But all will have received new ideas. Even those who have been chased through the streets by the hoodlums of San Francisco have learned some new ideas. They can distinguish between a Christian and a politician and know who are their friends and what makes them so.