sympathy with missionary operations, and will do nothing
to impair their efficiency. We believe it to be sincerely actuated by a
desire to promote the best welfare of the Indians, and ready to
co-operate with all good people in efforts in this direction. It aims to
educate every Indian child. We desire to see this done, and believe that
when the Government assumes, as it should, the primary education of all
Indians of school age, we shall be called on to turn our efforts to a
much larger work for direct evangelization.

Our opportunity is enlarging further by the breaking down of the old
pagan prejudices of the Indians. The testimony of all the workers on the
field is to this effect. The Indians are desirous of living as white
men. They are rapidly losing their distinctive Indian ideas and are
imbibing the notions of their white neighbors. This is seen in their
burials, which now are not uniformly, as of old, on scaffolds, but are
more and more interments. It is shown in their feeling and behavior when
death comes into their households. They no longer fill their houses with
hideous outcries, but instead seek the missionaries to inquire about the
life in the other world.

A further opportunity is to be noted in the fact that the Dakota Indians
have specially fallen into our care. Our chief missions are located
among them, at Santee, Rosebud, Oahe, Standing Rock, and outlying
stations. But the Dakota Indians number 40,000 in all, or about
one-sixth of all the Indians in the country. We have mastered the Dakota
language; and a Bible, hymn-book, dictionary and other books are printed
in that tongue. We have, then, special ability to carry on mission work
among them, and are bound to utilize it to the full. The time is ripe
for immediate action. It must be taken without delay if taken at all.
The opening up to white settlement of a large strip of land though the
center of the great Sioux reservations is to bring the Indian into
contact with the influence of white men as never before. It is
impossible that that influence shall be altogether good. The contact of
the Indian with the frontiersmen of our own people has resulted most
deplorably in the past, and we cannot hope for much better results now.
Rum and licentiousness are sure to work untold harm to the Indian unless
they are met by the gospel. This opening up of Indian territory to white
settlement lays, therefore, a most imperative and immediate obligation
on Christian