If contact with civilization had taught the Eskimo the art of distillation and drunkenness, it also had improved living conditions among them. Many owned rifles. Their spears and harpoons were steel tipped. They bartered for flour, molasses, sugar, and all kinds of canned goods with the whale ships every summer. They had learned to cook. There was a stove in the village. The intellectual Eskimo boasted of the stove as showing the high degree of civilization achieved by his people. The stove, be it added, was used chiefly for heating purposes in winter and remained idle in summer. The natives regarded the cooked foods of the white man as luxuries to be indulged in only occasionally in a spirit of connoisseurship. They still preferred their immemorial diet of blubber and raw meat. Aside from these faint touches of civilization, the Eskimos were as primitive in their life and mental processes as people who suddenly had stepped into the present out of the world of ten thousand years ago. I fancy Adam and Eve would have lived after the manner of the Eskimos if the Garden of Eden had been close to the North Pole. There is apparently no government or law among these Eskimos. They have no chiefs. When it becomes necessary to conduct any business of public importance with outsiders, it is looked after by the old men. The Eskimos are a race, one may say, of individuals. Each one lives his life according to his own ideas; without let or hindrance. Each is a law unto himself. Under these conditions one might expect they would hold to the rule of the strong arm under which might makes right. This is far from true. There is little crime among them. Murder is extremely rare. Though they sometimes steal from white men--the sailors on the brig were warned that they would steal anything not nailed down--they are said never--or hardly ever--to steal from each other. They have a nice respect for the rights of their neighbors. They are not exactly a Golden Rule people, but they mind their own business. The infrequency of crime among them seems stranger when one learns that they never punish their children. Eskimo children out-Topsy Topsy in "just growing." I was informed that they are never spanked, cuffed, or boxed on the ears. Their little misdemeanors are quietly ignored. It might seem logical to expect these ungoverned and lawless little fellows to grow up into bad men and women. But the ethical tradition of the race holds them straight. When a crime occurs, the punishment meted out fits it as exactly as possible. We heard of a murder among the Eskimos around St. Lawrence Bay the punishment of which furnishes a typical example of Eskimo justice. A young man years before had slain a missionary by shooting him with a rifle. The old men of the tribe tried the murderer and condemned him to death. His own father executed the sentence with the same rifle with which the missionary had been killed.