Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/769

Rh dictum. Mr. Windom, of Minnesota, is reported as recently saying in the Federal Senate that "the Indians are the greatest liars and vagabonds upon the face of the earth." With their rank as vagabonds we have no immediate concern, but in regard to their grade as liars we think the Senator is in error; he is over-modest; the "greatness" which he so freely accords to the savages, in this respect, belongs preeminently to his own race. The rivalries of falsehood between races, like other rivalries, must depend upon capacity, culture, and opportunity; and, in any competition for honors in deception, the Yankee has proved from the beginning to be much "smarter" than the Indian. Our Senator, indeed, if the reports can be trusted (and they are white, not Indian reports), might be taken as a living and conclusive illustration of the superiority of the superior race in perpetrating falsehood on an imposing scale. He is said to have advocated a breach of the treaty by which the "Black Hills" are reserved to the Sioux, so as to let in all the white adventurers that choose to go there; that is, to break the faith and pledge of the Government, and turn the whole nation into liars by virtue of our representative system. This brings out the exalted advantages in the practice of falsification possessed by the dominant race over the uncultivated savages. We can perpetrate deceit by official machinery. Even in the smallest way, in the hand-to-hand competition of a huckstering trade, the Yankee may be trusted anywhere to circumvent, that is, to outlie the Indian. But when we consider the case in its broader aspects, where the two sorts of people work freely in their separate social spheres, the Indians are not to be named as competitors of the whites in the art of mendacity. Granting the disposition, they lack the resources and capacity. Mentally, they are children, with but little knowledge, scanty ideas upon a few subjects, and limited intellectual operations. They lack the scope, the cultivation, the facilities for exercise in deceit which are possessed by the civilized race. Without books, newspapers, advertisements, highly-organized party politics, diplomacy, lawsuits, complex business rivalries, sectarian strifes, big enterprises, and fashionable society, what can they do in the way of duplicity, fraud, imposition, misrepresentation, artifice, cheating, forgery, perjury, and the thousand forms, and grades, and variations of lying, in which the dominant race is so proficient? The civilized man multiplies his capacity of falsehood through division of labor. He not only lies with his tongue, but with his hands, manipulating falsehood into his manufactures. He lies by machinery, and swindles by steam. By the printing-press he scatters deceptions like snow-flakes over the continent. Your civilizee lies with enterprise, through an army of agents by post and by telegraph. What can the "poor Indian," with his "untutored mind," do in comparison with this? There was more lying in the management of the Northern Pacific Railroad than ten tribes of Indians could perpetrate in a generation. There is more lying in one presidential campaign than all the North American tribes could perpetrate in a century. The Indians are no more "the greatest liars on the face of the earth" than they are the greatest lawyers, politicians, editors, merchants, and manufacturers, on the face of the earth. Fraud, falsification, dissimulation, insincerity, trickery, overreaching, and the innumerable grades and shades of humbug, are vices of the civilized man, and he must accept this with all his other forms of greatness. The Indian has undoubtedly a rudimental capacity for lying, which gets somewhat developed along the borders, by his intercourse with the whites, but he cannot aspire to the unenviable eminence which Senator Windom ascribes to him.