Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/166

132 learn how to read and write but how to live. On most of the Indian reservations he lives only among his own kind, excepting the teachers and the few white agency people. He may feel the necessity of changing his mode of life ever so strongly; he may hear of civilization ever so much; but as long as he has not with his own eyes seen civilization at work, it will remain to him only a vague, shadowy idea—a new-fangled, outlandish contrivance, the objects of which cannot be clearly appreciated by him in detail. He hears that he must accept “the white man's way,” and, in an indistinct manner, he is impressed with the necessity of doing so. But what is the white man's way? What ends does it serve? What means does it employ? What is necessary to attain it? The teaching in a school on an Indian reservation, in the midst of Indian barbarism, answers these questions only from hearsay. The impressions it thus produces, whether in all things right or in some things wrong, will, in any event, be insufficient to give the mind of the Indian a clear conception of what “the white man's way” really is. The school on the reservation undoubtedly does some good, but it does not enough. If the Indian is to become civilized, the most efficient method will be to permit him to see and watch civilization at work in its own atmosphere. In order to learn to live like the white man, he should see and observe how the white man lives in his own surroundings, what he is doing, and what he is doing it for. He should have an opportunity to observe, not by an occasional bewildering glimpse, like the Indians who now and then come to Washington to see the “Great Father,” but observe with the eye of an interested party, while being taught to do likewise.

Such considerations led the Government, under the last Administration, largely to increase the number of Indian pupils at the

Normal School at Hampton, Va.,