not leave a thing around loose or the Indians will steal it. You may remember the story of the good bishop who was crossing a reservation, and, when night came, began looking around him. "What are you looking for?" inquired his Indian guide. "A place to hide my watch, my purse, and other valuables," he answered. "Oh, never mind that," said the Indian, "there isn't a white man within a hundred miles of here."

A delegation of Osage Indians visited me at Washington about three years ago. After we had had a long council, a subchief put his hand under his blanket and drew forth a scroll, which he handed me, saying: “I wish my father would look at what is in this scroll, and tell me whether it is, like what we have been talking about here today." I opened it, and found that it was a parchment writing signed by Thomas Jefferson's secretary of war setting forth the friendly relations between the government and the Indians, and closing substantially as follows: "Attached to this parchment is a chain of pure gold. Until that gold shall tarnish, the friendship between the white man and his red brother shall remain undimmed." I looked in the upper left-hand corner, and there, sure enough, was the chain-a very good one, about eighteen inches long, and heavy. It was intact, just as when in 1804 President Jefferson's secretary of war had fastened it to the parchment. One hundred years had elapsed. In the interval, these Indians had gone thru many vicissitudes of fortune; they had lived in tents, in holes in the ground, in brush houses, in log houses; they had not had a bank or a safety vault in which to deposit this parchment; and yet in all those hundred years, that chain had not found its way to the pawn shop! I think on honesty those Indians could give points to San Francisco!

We hear that the Indian is naturally a dependent creature, and that he enjoys the pauperized condition to which an ill-judged philanthropy has degraded so many of his people. Why, my friends, in 1895, the Navajo Indians had had a particularly hard winter. They had lost multitudes of their sheep, their crops had failed, and they were reduced to eating their ponies, which is about the last thing to which Indians will resort. Someone in Congress introduced a paragraph into the annual Indian appropriation bill, granting $20,000 to furnish rations to the tribe. No sooner had the news found its way to Arizona, than I received letters from two old Navajo head men, imploring me to use all the influence I possessed to prevent Congress from passing that appropriation. Why? "Because we do not want our young men to learn to eat the bread of the government!" If that had happened among white people, you would call it a pretty fine exhibition of character; I do not know why it is not equally fine among red people.

Again, we are told that we can never do anything toward really civilizing the Indian, beacuse he is not "adaptable."

My old friend Quanah Parker, chief of the Comanches, used to do a great many favors for the cattle men who were down in his country, looking after their affairs, seeing that his Indians did not kill their stock, and so on. By

and by the cattle men thought they would give him a present in token of their appreciation. They first gave him money to build a house, as he had said that he would prefer a nice house to anything else. The next year they came around but found no house there, and asked Quanah the reason. "Oh," answered Quanah, "I had some debts to pay and some poor people to feed, and the money is all gone." So the cattle men concluded to build the house themselves. One who was to have contributed to the fund was abroad at the time the hat was passed, and when he returned he said: "Quanah, I didn't get a chance to help build your house, but I would like to give you something to put into it—a nice piece of furniture or something like that. Now, what shall it be?" "Well," responded Quanah, "I would like a roller-top desk, and a chair that goes round like this"-indicating the motion. of a revolving chair. "Why, my friend," protested the cattle man, “what would you do with a roller-top desk? You don't know how to write." "Oh," responded Quanah, "I can sit in the chair and put my feet on the desk, and put a big cigar in my mouth, and hold a newspaper up before me, so, and when a white man comes and knocks at my door, I can say: 'Go 'way, I'm busy now.""

Now, of course, these things deal with externals, but with the large part of the white people who criticise, externals count for everything. There is a widespread idea that if you can strip an Indian of his buckskin and his beads, and put him into a broadcloth coat, and give him a high hat and polished boots, you have civilized him. In the annual report of the commissioner of Indian affairs there used to be a column in which was given the number of Indians who had adopted, either wholly or in part, "civilized dress." That column was about the first thing I ran my blue pencil thru when I came into office. I struck it out because I did not believe that it told anybody anything worth telling. What I cared for was the man under the clothing-not the clothing itself. After I had stricken out the table, many good people among the audiences I addressed used to ask me why I had done so. I answered, because it had kept me solving so many puzzles; and then I explained:

For example, one old Indian in the Southwest, who always comes to see me whenever I am in this neighborhood, even if he has to walk fourteen or fifteen miles to shake my hand, feels impelled to dress himself in ceremonial costume when he is about to come into my presence. This costume consists of a nightgown. Now, we all know that a nightgown constitutes a part of civilized costume for the white man, at least through a certain part of the twenty-four hours, and why not for the Indian in the other part? And so I was puzzled and distressed by trying to decide into which column to put my old Indian friend-whether among those who had adopted civilized dress wholly, or those who had adopted it only in part.

That is a fair illustration of the sort of logic which appeals to a great number of people who have undertaken the civilization and education of the Indian. Their idea seems to be that we should put something on the outside

of him and drive it down into him by force, instead of stirring up something on the inside of him and developing it until it comes out of itself.

One of the very worst mistakes we have made is trying to do everything for him with too much uniformity. There is no race of people, I venture to say, who have more native individuality than the Indians, and I believe most heartily in drawing it out and cultivating it. The poorest thing we can do with the Indians is to put them into a machine at one end and turn a crank and grind them out at the other end, carefully molded citizens, all after one pattern. The Indians have race characteristics which differ from ours, but which are very good of their kind. They have their own art ideals, and you will find in nearly every Indian the instinct of the artist. The old way of handling this matter in the schools was to put before the children designs of our own preparing and telling them to copy these. We have got away from that. If you want to see how far, go up to the Normal Building tomorrow and look at the exhibit a small one and very hastily gathered-which Miss De Cora, our Indian teacher of native art at Carlisle, has brought here to show what her little people are doing. She is drawing out what is already in them, instead of cramming them with something from outside. There, again, is Indian music. Plenty of people will tell you that Indian music consists of only a guttural whine, punctuated with beats on a tom-tom. They have ignored all that is best in Indian music and taken the lowest types of it as types of all. European composers have not been so foolish. They have seen how much in Indian music is worthy of preservation, and have exclaimed at our negligence in letting this resource die out thru our failure to recognize its value. I am trying to bring our service back into the right track in this regard also. I want the children in our Indian schools to be able to sing the songs of their people, just as Germans, tho living among us, sing the songs of their fatherland-you have heard some of these tonight. I want our schools to encourage the children to sing their own songs, and in their own language. At Oraibi, one of our most successful teachers, Miss Stanley, has her children bring the songs sung to them by their mothers in the nursery and sing them in the classroom. When she opens the day with these little songs, the children attack the rest of their work with a spirit and a snap unknown to children who have to start the day in the ordinary

way.

I see, my friends, that I have exhausted my time. I thank you very much for your kind attention and indulgence. I am already due at a gathering of my fellows in the Indian service in another place, but I could not resist the invitation to come here and say these few words of greeting-the greeting of one laborer to other laborers in a similar field; and to remind you that, altho your task seems discouraging at times, it is a great work in which you are engaged, and that one day you will realize that there is more real joy in the heat of struggle than can be found in the fulfilled accomplish

ment.

GREETINGS FROM A SISTER REPUBLIC

M. URIBE Y TRANCOSO, REPRESENTING THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUC-
TION AND FINE ARTS OF THE REPUBLIC OF MEXICO

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is certainly a glorious event which this Association commemorates today. A life of fifty years so fruitful in useful results, intellectual and moral, is the best proof that the high ideals in which its foundation was laid, germinating in a soil very well adapted to them, after half a century of continued growth, as under one of those gigantic trees of California, have gathered and united under its shade the teachers of all the states of the Union.

For the first time in the history of the Association, the educators of another country have been invited to take part in its labors, and with extreme gallantry it has called on the sister republic, with which this country maintains common ideals and interests. Honored by this eloquent proof of distinction, the secretary of public instruction and fine arts of Mexico appointed a delegation to bring to this Association an expression of gratitude on the part of the government and, at the same time, of the teachers of Mexico for this proof of international fraternity; and charged them with the agreeable task of telling you how profoundly it is devoted to the work of teaching and education, convinced that when education has been founded upon really scientific bases, it constitutes the most secure foundation of greatness and prosperity of the nations.

Certainly, one of the most powerful causes of the enormous development and prosperity of your great country has been the education, philosophically directed and vastly extended to all social classes from the laborer to the professional man; but the result is more especially due to the spreading among the people of the scientific notions in which must be built all work intended to put aside the routine, and enable them to think out the necessities always growing out of modern industrial competition.

The intellectual and physical education has received in the United States for a long time specialized attention, and the results have shown themselves in the form of a well-balanced generation which expresses the old mens sana in corpore sano, and which with a reserve of mental energy, accumulated by a good preparation of both brains and muscles, has permitted to undertake the gigantic works which have transformed the deserts into emporiums of civilization, uniting with the steel nerves of the railroads the most distant regions of this very extensive country and originating at the end a peculiar civilization admired and studied attentively in Europe and America.

It is enough to read the programs of the different sections of this Association to comprehend the very important part which your works have had in the formation and development of national culture. To bring together and to put in contact the teachers of the most distant places; to procure the exchange of ideas in regard to the benefit of the different methods now in use; to unify

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scientifically the opinions; to form a body of doctrines, which in a definite moment the teacher can consult, even in the most distant town, is a task certainly worthy of all praise and encouragement.

It is a pleasure to Mexico to associate herself with this great educational movement, being, as she is, extremely interested in the solution of the same problems—that is, in the diffusion of instruction to all the classes of society, and in perfecting and transforming its educational methods.

In a recent speech, our illustrious educator, Mr. Justo Sierra, minister of public instruction and fine arts, said that the most important problem of modern Mexico is the formation and unification of the national spirit. We stumble really over an obstacle which the United States has scarcely encountered. More than half of the population of Mexico is formed of Indians, whom we have to assimilate in the movement of active progress, which takes place in all parts of the Republic. This task is not easy. Our progress we have realized almost without the co-operation of this important portion of our nationality, and it is already time that the new generation of Indians should enter actively into the now open way.

To accomplish this we depend upon a powerful-an almost unique factoreducation. After the unfortunate vicisitudes thru which Mexico has passed, and the long period of social instability which the civil wars brought, has come an era of peace, based upon firm foundations, and one of its principal fruits is already the reorganization of national education.

The government of Mexico is firmly persuaded that in order to carry forward its program, it is necessary to base instruction on methods and principles essentially scientific, and it has sent, and sends continually, to this country and to Europe its teachers, in order that they may study the different methods, selecting those that may be most adapted to our medium and to our race.

Knowing perfectly how the improvement of the scholar is affected by physical health, and how the task of the teacher is facilitated when the children. have sound bodies, large amounts have lately been dedicated to the construction of new schoolhouses, with all the modern conveniences, and in the most hygienic manner, for the purpose of avoiding physical deformities in the pupils, such as myopia and all the other evil consequences which the school life imposes upon children.

Already five new school buildings have been completed in the city of Mexico, the cost of which has varied from one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars each, and the government is now planning to construct all that may be necessary, with every hygienic requisite.

There has existed in the city of Mexico for some years past an official body of medical inspectors of schools, which has given excellent results, and the creation of an anthropometric department is projected, that may bring about the best means to avoid the harmful influence of school confinement on the health of the children.

Alcoholism being one of the greatest factors of physical degeneration, and