Bring up an Indian child, and see if you
can attach it to you." The next moment, she expressed, in the presence
of one of those children whom she was bringing up, loathing at the
odor left by one of her people, and one of the most respected, as
he passed through the room. When the child is grown, she will be
considered basely ungrateful not to love the lady, as she certainly
will not; and this will be cited as an instance of the impossibility
of attaching the Indian.

Whether the Indian could, by any efforts of love and intelligence
from, the white man, have been civilized and made a valuable
ingredient in the new state, I will not say; but this we are sure
of,--the French Catholics, at least, did not harm them, nor disturb
their minds merely to corrupt them. The French, they loved. But the
stern Presbyterian, with his dogmas and his task-work, the city circle
and the college, with their niggard concessions and unfeeling stare,
have never tried the experiment. It has not been tried. Our people and
our government have sinned alike against the first-born of the
soil, and if they are the fated agents of a new era, they have done
nothing,--have invoked no god to keep them sinless while they do the
hest of fate.

Worst of all is it, when they invoke the holy power only to mask their
iniquity; when the felon trader, who, all the week, has been besotting
and degrading the Indian with rum mixed with red pepper, and damaged
tobacco, kneels with him on Sunday before a common altar, to tell
the rosary which recalls the thought of Him crucified for love of
suffering men, and to listen to sermons in praise of "purity"!!

"My savage friends," cries the old, fat priest, "you must, above all
things, aim at _purity_."

Oh! my heart swelled when I saw them in a Christian church. Better
their own dog-feasts and bloody rites than such mockery of that other
faith.

"The dog," said an Indian, "was once a spirit; he has fallen for his
sin, and was given by the Great Spirit, in this shape, to man, as his
most intelligent companion. Therefore we sacrifice it in highest honor
to our friends in this world,--to our protecting geniuses in another."

There was religion in that thought. The white man sacrifices his own
brother, and to Mammon, yet he turns in loathing from, the dog-feast.

"You say," said the Indian of the South to the missionary, "that
Christianity is pleasing to God. How can that be?--Those men at
Savannah are Christians."