One of the leading inducements for Indians to enter into such enterprises, and the one which gains the consent of their friends and relations around them, and more particularly is advanced to the world as the plausible motive for taking Indians abroad, is that of enlightening them--of opening their eyes to the length and breadth of civilization, and all the inventions and improvements of enlightened society. These three parties (having met their old friend and advocate abroad, who has introduced them to the highest society of the world--has led them into three palaces, and from those down through every grade of society, and into almost every institution and factory of the continent--whose eyes and whose ears have been opened to most of the information and improvements of this enlightened age, and who have gone back to relate and to apply, in their own country, the knowledge they have gained) will furnish the best argument on record, for or against the propriety of bringing American Indians abroad, as the means of enlightening them and making them suitable teachers of civilization when they go back to the wilderness. And though the pages of this book cannot sum up the results of these visits, which can only be looked up ultimately in the respective tribes to which they have returned, yet a few words more upon the materials with which they have returned, and the author's opinion (in his familiar knowledge of the Indians' mode of reasoning) of their probable results, may not be obtrusive, as a sort of recapitulation of scenes and estimates, with their tendencies, made in the foregoing pages. It is natural, or at least habitual, to suppose that, for the ignorant to learn is always to improve; and that what a savage people can learn amongst civilized society _must be_ for their benefit. But in this view of the case, which would generally be correct, there arises a very fair question how far, for the benefit of the unenlightened parts of the world, it is judicious to acquaint them at a glance, with the whole glare of the lights and shades of civilized life, by opening the eyes of such parties to so many virtues and so many luxuries and refinements so far beyond the possibility of their acquiring, and at the same time to so many vices, to so much poverty and beggary not known in their simple modes of life, to teach to their people and to descant on when they get home; themselves as well as those whom they are teaching, despairing of ever attaining to what they have seen to admire and covet, and unwilling to descend to the degrading vices and poverty which they have seen mixed up in the mysterious and money-making medley of civilization.