Teaching, I have always thought, should be gradual, and but one thing (or at most but few things) taught at a time. By all who know me and my views, I am known to be, as I am, an advocate of civilization; but of civilization, as it has generally been taught amongst the American Indians, I have a poor opinion; and of the plan I am now treating of, of sending parties to foreign countries to see all that can be seen and learned in civilized life, I have a still poorer opinion, being fully convinced that they learn too much for useful teachers in their own country. The strides that they thus take are too great and too sudden for the slow and gradual steps that can alone bring man from a savage to a civilized state. They require absolutely the reverse of what they will learn from such teachers. They should, with all their natural prejudices against civilized man, be held in ignorance of the actual crime, dissipation, and poverty that belong to the enlightened world, until the honest pioneer, in his simple life, with his plough and his hoe, can wile them into the mode of raising the necessaries of life, which are the first steps from savage to civil, and which they will only take when their prejudices against white men are broken down, which is most effectually done by teaching them the modes of raising their food and acquiring property. I therefore am constrained to give judgment here against the propriety of parties of Indians visiting foreign countries with a view to enlightening their people when they go back; and here also to register my opinion, for which I am daily asked, as to the effects which these visits to Europe will have upon the parties who have been abroad, and what impressions they will make amongst their people when they return. I am sure they saw many things which pleased them and gained their highest admiration, and which they might be benefited by seeing; and also that they saw many others which it would have been decidedly better they had never seen. They have witnessed and appreciated the virtues and blessings, and at the same time the vices and miseries and degradations of civilized life, the latter of which will doubtless have made the deepest impressions upon their minds, and which (not unlike some _more distinguished travellers than themselves_) they will comment and enlarge upon, and about in equal justice to the nation they represent and are endeavouring to instruct.