1884.] CIVILIZATION AND ITS WASTES. 241 



policy of rich gifts to murderous chieftains who had recently been 

 on the war-path. " Perhaps, if I make trouble, and kill some- 

 body, the great father will send them to me ? " he asks. The 

 logic of the plains is more than a match for the barbarous states- 

 manship that allows the strong to oppress the weak. Native 

 American tribes, it is said, number as many people as they did at 

 the beginning of white settlement, but it is doubtful if their quality 

 has improved. 



Our forefathers beat the Indians from their lands by their superior 

 knowledge of somewhat intricate artificial things. Rum and 

 sugar, gun powder, and certain contagious diseases which their 

 women were not familiar with, were the chief conquering elements 

 in that fight. These weapons, it may be remarked, were about 

 equally injurious to the aggressive party. The axe and plow, with 

 the destruction of fish and game, were prominent aids upon our 

 side. 



The changes we have made in the last half century could 

 scarcely be conceived greater from any convulsion of the conti- 

 nent. The main-spring of society in a strong and contented rural 

 people has been broken. Public health is destroyed in its aerial 

 and aqueous fountains. An artful and unnatural concentration of 

 human industry is proving itself now, as it has done so many 

 times before, a feverish, filthy, and wasteful experiment. Civili- 

 zation has no sanitary common-sense equivalent to the wholesome, 

 hereditary science of the uncontaminated savage. Books, unread 

 by the many, offer no practical substitute for righteous human law, 

 bred in the bone and flesh of righteous family life. 



Within the easy memory of living men, we have swept available 

 fertility into the sea at a rate that no nation, lacking our long 

 railway arms, ever has or ever could approach. The Roman 

 Empire hurt the soil less in five hundred years' slow hauling of 

 ox-teams. In the matter of land butchery, the great Yankee 

 nation stands pre-eminent. 



You never expect any valuable statistics from me, Mr. Chairman. 

 You seem to be satisfied if I remind you of things which you 

 already know. But it happens that flying sheets of census reports 

 are blowing about country lanes so that anybody may know now 

 what they contain. Citizens, by the way, learn to value census 

 figures, by seeing how agents "load up " at their places. 



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