o missionary instruction, and with the more
color as the untaught race is noted for stealing from Europeans
everything they can lay hands on. It is only, however, from foreigners
that they were ever accustomed to steal. Toward each other they have
ever been among the most honest of human beings. Civilization and the
seal they regarded as alike lawful prey. The missionaries have not
implanted in them a new disposition, but only extended the scope of an
old and marked characteristic.

At the same time their sense of pecuniary obligation would seem not to
extend over long periods. Of the missionaries in winter they buy
supplies on credit, but show little remembrance of the debt when summer
comes. All must be immediate with them; neither their thought nor their
moral sense can carry far; they are equally improvident for the future
and forgetful of the past. The mere Nature-man acts only as Nature and
her necessities press upon him; thought and memory are with him the
offspring of sensation; his brain is but the feminine spouse of his
stomach and blood,--receptive and respondent, rather than virile and
original.

Partly, however, this seeming forgetfulness is susceptible of a
different explanation. They evidently feel that the mission-house owes
them a living. They make gardens, go to church and save their souls, for
the missionaries; it is but fair that they should be fed at a pinch in
return.

This remark may seem a sneer. Not so; my word for it. I went to Hopedale
to study this race, with no wish but to find in them capabilities of
spiritual growth, and with no resolve but to see the fact, whatever it
should be, not with wishes, but with eyes. And, pointedly against my
desire, I saw this,--that the religion of the Esquimaux is, nine parts
in ten at least, a matter of personal relation between him and
the missionaries. He goes to church as the dog follows his
master,--expecting a bone and hoping for a pat in return. He comes
promptly at a whistle (the chapel-bell); his docility and decorum are
unimpeachable; he does what is expected of him with a pleased wag of the
tail; but it is still, it is always, the dog and his master.

The pre-Adamite man is not distinctively religious; for religion implies
ideas, in the blood at least, if not in the brain, as imagination, if
not as thought; and ideas are to him wanting, are impossible. His whole
being is summed and concluded in a relationship to the external, the
tangible, to