Another specimen of the desert-born, the Western Indian, forms an exhibit as little suited as the improved Arab horse to discussion and award at a session fraught with that "calm contemplation and poetic ease" which ought to mark the deliberations of the judges. How are the representatives of fifty-three tribes to be put through their paces? These poor fragments of the ancient population of the Union have, if we exclude the Cherokees and Choctaws and two or three of the Gila tribes, literally nothing to show. The latter can present us with a faint trace of the long-faded civilization of their Aztec kindred, while the former have only borrowed a few of the rudest arts of the white, and are protected from extinction merely by the barrier of a frontier more and more violently assailed each year by the speculator and the settler, and already passed by the railway. If we cannot exactly say that the Indian, alone of all the throng at the exhibition, goes home uninformed and unenlightened, what ideas may reach his mind will be soon smothered out by the conditions which surround him on the Plains. It is singular that a population of three or four hundred thousand, far from contemptible in intellectual power, and belonging to a race which has shown itself capable of a degree of civilization many of the tribes of the Eastern continents have never approached, should be so absolutely an industrial cipher. The African even exports mats, palm-oil and peanuts, but the Indian exports nothing and produces nothing. He lacks the sense of property, and has no object of acquisition but scalps. Can the assembled ingenuity of the nineteenth century, in presence of this mass of waste human material, devise no means of utilizing it? There stands its Frankenstein, ready made, perfect in thews and sinews, perfect also in many of its nobler parts. It is not a creation that is demanded--simply a remodeling or expansion. For success in this achievement the United States can afford to offer a pecuniary prize that will throw into the shade all the other prizes put together. The cost of the Indian bureau for 1875-76 reached eight millions of dollars. The commission appointed to treat for the purchase of the Black Hills reports that the feeding and clothing of the Sioux cost the government thirteen millions during the past seven years; and that without the smallest benefit to those spirited savages. Says the report: "They have made no advancement whatever, but have done absolutely nothing but eat, drink, smoke and sleep."