In our Indian schools industries are taught and practiced. At the Santee Agency a tract of nearly 500 acres gives room that is well used for farming and stock-raising, and well-arranged shops give employment in carpentry, blacksmithing and printing and other avocations. The "Word Carrier," a monthly publication, is not surpassed in neatness of printing by any paper that comes to this office. In other Indian schools various industries are taught, especially those that relate to the care and improvement of homes.
As evidence that this industrial work is pushed forward, we may mention that in our most recently established school in the South, that at Enfield, N. C., the farm of more than a thousand acres of land (the gift of a generous Christian lady of Brooklyn, N. Y.), a large portion of which is under cultivation, gives ample employment to the student. Cotton, corn, potatoes, and the products of the field, the garden and the orchard are cultivated, while in the shops the boys are taught in blacksmithing and in carpentry, and the girls in the various kinds of domestic work, sewing, cooking and housework.
BOTH ARE RIGHT.
Mr. Booker T. Washington has written two very able articles in The Independent, setting forth the supreme importance of industrial training and work among the colored people of the South. On the other hand, Dr. T. J. Morgan, Secretary of the Baptist Home Missionary Society, has published in the same paper a carefully prepared article, emphasizing the absolute necessity of the higher education of the leaders of that people. Both these writers are correct. No people can rise unless they have the guidance and inspiration of highly educated ministers, teachers, thinkers and writers, and no people can rise if its masses are idle and unthrifty. The American Missionary Association aims, in its great work, to give due and impartial importance to both aspects of this great problem.
THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES.
A peculiar history is that of the five civilized tribes of Indians. It was supposed for a time that they had given the brightest example of the success of the Indian on his reservation. These tribes had forms of government modeled after that of the States. They had governors, legislators, and judges, schools and churches. Many of the members were highly educated. But the outcome has been a failure. The laws are inadequately administered, and crime has been rampant and unpunished. But now the general Government has taken the one decisive and initial step in the matter by directing that the United States courts should have civil and criminal jurisdiction over all cases arising in the Indian Territory, irrespective of race. Thus the wedge has entered, and the reservation system and the dream of Indian autonomy—an empire within an empire—will happily soon be a thing of the past.