ONE of the memorable and pitiable sights of the West, as the traveller journeys across the prairies, is the little group of Indians hanging round the lonely railway station. They are not dangerous now, nor are they dignified; they are harmless, poor, abject, shiftless, ready to beg or ready to steal, or to do anything else except work, and the one possession of the past which they still retain is the inventive and instinctive cunning of the savage, who can read the faintest sign like a written language, and knows the surest way of capturing his prey. One never forgets the squalid figure with some remains of former grandeur in his dress, and the gulf between us and this being of another race, unchanged amid the modern civilization. And then one comes home and suddenly recognizes our savages at our own doors. Our savage tramps along our country roads, and loafs along our busy streets, he stops us with his whine when no policeman is near, and presents himself upon our doorstep, and when he is a master of his business he will make his way into our house. He has his own dress, combining many styles and various periods, though reduced to a harmony by his vagabond personality. He has his own language, which is unintelligible to strangers, and a complete system of communication by pictures. He marries and lives and dies outside civilization, sharing neither our habits nor our ideas, nor our labours, nor our religion, and the one infallible and universal badge of his tribe is that our savage will not work. He will hunger and thirst, he will sweat and suffer, he will go without shelter and without comfort, he will starve and die, but one thing he will not do, not even to get bread, and that is work; not even for tobacco, his dearest treasure and kindliest support, will he do fifteen minutes' honest labour. The first and last article in his creed, for which he is prepared to be a martyr and which makes him part of a community, is “I believe in idleness.” He has in him the blood of generations of nomads, and if taken off the roads, and compelled to earn his living would likely die. A general law of compulsory industry would bring the race to an end.