We must not try to push the Indian forward too fast. There is no use in trying to make the adult Indian of to-day an agriculturist, or to take him far out of the sphere in which he was brought up. Once the writer happened to be in company with a gentleman who has given some thought to the Indian question, and has had some experience of the Indian character, when a feathered and beaded warrior made his appearance. He was richly dressed—scarlet cloth, eagle’s feathers, profusely-beaded moccasins. “It is nonsense to expect such a creature as that to dig in mud and dirt,” said our friend. “He would spoil his fine clothes and ruin his dainty moccasins.” And there was much wisdom in the remark. The best you can do with the adult Indian is to make him a stock-raiser. Give him good brood mares. Introduce good blood among his herds of ponies. Then find a market for his horses. Buy them for the cavalry. Let him raise a certain proportion of mules, and let the government buy them for the Quartermaster’s Department. Encourage him to raise beef-cattle enough at least for his own consumption; and if you can induce him to raise a surplus, buy the surplus for the Subsistence Department. Give the Indian a fair price for his produce. Dash down the monopoly of Indian trading. Allow any merchant of good standing to trade with the Indian, under proper restrictions as to exclusion of ammunition and spirituous liquors. Let the red man have the benefit of free-trade and competition. Ammunition should be furnished, when necessary, only by the Ordnance Department.
Let the red man also have the same liberty of conscience which is accorded to the white, the black, and even the yellow. Let there be no more parcelling out of Indians among jarring sects. Let them have missionaries of their choice.
Compel all children now under fourteen years to attend schools. Vary school exercises with the use of tools in the workshop or agricultural training in the field. Thus you may make some mechanics and some agriculturists out of the generation now rising. You will have more out of the next generation. But you cannot make an agriculturist out of the grown-up Indian, nor a mechanic. It is folly to attempt it. You cannot reconcile to our nineteenth-century civilization those who have grown up to maturity with the ideas, manners, and morals of the heroic ages. You can no more expect Crazy Horse to use the shovel and the hoe than you could Achilles and Tydides Diomed to plant melons or beans.
THE ONE GREAT REMEDY, AND THE HOPELESSNESS OF ITS APPLICATION.
The remedy of remedies is common honesty in our dealings with the Indian, backed by a force strong enough and always ready to promptly crush any attempt at revolt, and punish speedily and severely every act of lawlessness committed by an Indian. But too many are interested in keeping up the present system to warrant even the slenderest hope of any radical change. To put it in crude frontier terms: “There is too much money in it.” Politicasters, capitalists, contractors, sub-contractors, agents, traders, agency employés, “squaw-men”—or degraded whites who live in a state of concubinage with Indian women, and who are generally tools and touters for the traders—hosts of sinecurists and their friends, find “money in it.” The links of the ring are legion. It is too strong. It can shelve or crush any man with honesty and boldness enough to attack the system. It is too strong for the commissioner or the secretary. It is to be feared that it may prove too strong for the country.
CHARLES LEVER AT HOME.
The man whose rollicking pen has made more dragoons than all the recruiting-sergeants in her Britannic Majesty’s service; who has “promoted” the “Connaught Rangers” and Faugh a ballaghs into corps d’élite; who has broken more bones across country than the six-foot stone walls of Connemara; whose pictures of that land “which smiles through her tears like a sunbeam in showers” are as racy of the soil as her own emerald shamrock; who has painted Irish girls pure as angels’ whispers, bright as saucy streamlets, and the “boys” a bewildering compound of fun, fight, frolic, and “divarshin”; whose career was as stainless as his success was merited, and whose memory is an heirloom—was born in the city of Dublin in the year of grace 1806. Graduating at Cambridge University, and subsequently at the U-niversity of Göttingen, his student-life betrayed no symptoms of the mental élan which was to distinguish him later on, and, save for its Bohemianism, was absolutely colorless, and even dull. The boy was not father to the man. Selecting the medical profession as much by chance as predilection, he succeeded, during the visitation of cholera in 1832, in obtaining an appointment as medical superintendent in the northwest of Ireland, in the districts of Londonderry and Coleraine, and for a time continued to “guess at prescriptions, invent ingredients,” and generally administer to the requirements of afflicted humanity. But the task was uncongenial, the life a dead-level, flavored with no spice of variety, uncheckered in its monotonous routine. It was a “bad billet, an’ no Christian man cud live in it, barrin’ a say-gull or a dispinsiry docthor.” Doctor Lever!—pshaw! Charley Lever; who ever thinks of the author of Harry Lorrequer as Doctor Lever? Nevertheless, his experiences at this period bore him rich fruit in the after-time, and in Billy Traynor, “poet, peddler, and physician” (The Fortunes of Glencore), we have a type of the medical men with whom he was then associated. “I am the nearest thing to a doctor going,” says Billy. “I can breathe a vein against any man in the barony. I can’t say that for any articular congestion of the aortis valve, or for a seropulmonic diathesis, d’ye mind, that there isn’t as good as me; but for the ould school of physic, the humoral diagnostic touch, who can beat me?” The hedge-doctor and hedge-schoolmaster, pedants both, are now an institution of the past.
Charles Lever, however, was not destined to blush unseen or waste his sweetness on a country practice. Appointed to the Legation at Brussels, he bounded from the dreary drudgery of a dispensary to the glittering gayety of an embassy, from the hideous squalor of the fever-reeking cabin to the coquettish gravity of the palatial sick-room. In “Belgium’s capital” the cacoethes scribendi seized him, and the result was Harry Lorrequer. He awoke, and, like Lord Byron, found himself famous. The distinct portraiture, the brilliant style, the thoroughly Hibernian ensemble, claimed a well-merited success for the book, and, written at the right moment—how many good works have perished by being floated on an ebb tide!—the public, who had hitherto accepted Ireland through the clever but trashy effusions of Lady Morgan, and the more genuine metal of Maria Edgeworth and Samuel Lover, joyously turned towards the rising sun, and, seizing upon this genuine bit of shillelah, clamorously demanded a fresh sprig from the same tree. The wild dash, as exhilarating as “mountain dew,” the breezy freshness, the gay abandon of society and soldiering, the “moving accidents by flood and field,” acted upon the jaded palates of the British public like a tonic, and Harry Lorrequer, instead of being treated as an entrée, became respected as the pièce de résistance. Harry’s appearance on parade with the Othello blacking still upon his face; Miss Betty O’Dowd’s visit to Callonby on the “low-backed car”; her desire of disowning the nondescript vehicle, and its being announced by her shock-headed retainer as “the thing you know is at the doore”; the description of boarding-house life in Dublin sixty years ago; Mrs. Clanfrizzle’s, in Molesworth Street—the establishment is still in existence, and may be recognized in Lisle House; the “amateur hotel,” so graphically described by Mr. Lever; the picture of “dear, dirty Dublin” itself:
“Oh! Dublin, sure there is no doubtin’,