Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/380

 372 T. W. DAVENPORT. . % dently the Esquimaux cannot survive at the equator any more than the negro can live near the poles, but that both states have been derived progressively from the same source is not denied. "We are too much inclined to reckless generalizing with the Indian, who is not like the Saurians that perished from a change of physical environment. On the contrary, the present physical conditions are favorable to his continuance and the excitements that kept his faculties in healthy exercise in his tribal state can be found with slight modification among civilized people. That part of civilization which is poison to him is equally poisonous to the white man and is found in the abuses of civilization. He has been compelled to bear the diseases and abuses which the white man brought, without the curative relief which is the resource of the white man. To be sure, we provide doctors at the call of the penned -up agency Indian when he is sick, but what kind of success should we expect from the treatment by even skilled physicians who are actuated by a laudable desire for scientific experiment and who at the same time hold the common opinion that an Indian is only good when he is dead? Perhaps it is quite within a rational judgment to say that he is treated without that at- tentive sympathy bestowed by the white doctor upon one of his own race, and so far as we know there is no Christian Sci- ence to lift him up from the slough of despond into which many white people drift despite the help that other science brings. We expect him to pass from the free, wild, out-of- door life of the nomad, to the in-door, artificial life of a citizen, by the influence of example, and because he does not make a success of the compulsory venture, but suffers decima- tion, we at once declare him unfit and a vanishing relic of a by-gone age. How we forget that such a requirement is not according to the order of nature, that no such jumping transi- tion was ever known of any tribe or people inhabiting the earth. AVe did not pass from cave-dwellers to our present state except by ages of preparation and experience whereof science was born, arts multiplied and perfected, all of which