rum-sellers, traders, lawyers and other scoundrels that have endeavored to swindle him out of his own. But it isn’t necessary to go West to find out whether the Indian will work. One needs only to go down to Hampton, Virginia, where the government is supporting a lot of young Indians in the Normal school conducted by General Armstrong. I had heard so much about the unwonted spectacle of Indians, clothed and in their right minds, with clean faces and hands, studying books and using tools and behaving themselves like human beings--that a little while ago I went down to Hampton myself and went through the schools. First, I asked General Armstrong whether the Indian would work. “Will he work?” said the General, with a merry twinkle of his eye. “Well now, you roam about here yourself all day; I presume you know a red man from a black one when you see him; and you will have the question answered to your entire satisfaction.” I did, and was convinced. I saw Indians out-of-doors working the soil, and Indians indoors, in the shops, handling tools as skilfully as the average white man. I saw houses inhabited by picked Indian families--young people with children, and the “housekeeping”--one of the most comprehensive words in the world--was so thorough in all visible respects that either family seemed fit to teach domestic economy and neatness in many Northern villages I have seen. I saw four Indians in a class-room, at four separate blackboards, draw, inside of three minutes by the clock, four quite accurate maps of North America, putting the principal lakes and rivers in their proper places. Several prominent Americans (white) were with me at the time, and each admitted, for himself, that he could not have done as well to save his life; yet one was one of those railroad monopolists who want to own the earth, and are supposed to carry at least their own section of it in their mind’s eye. From General Armstrong himself I got the following brief statement of the Indian situation, and I have been unable to find any one in authority who is able to contradict any part of it. “There are now in this country (exclusive of the Alaskans) some 246,000 Indians, of whom 64,000 belong to the so-called civilized tribes, the Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks and Chickasaws. These, including their 16,000 ex-slaves, a rapidly increasing negro element, live, in the main, like white men. They, however, pay no taxes, receiving ample revenues from their interest in the sales of land to the government, but, while they have schools and churches and an organized government of their own, are held back by their adherence to the old tribal idea. This is thoroughly anti-progressive, and the savage Indian of to-day, who, taking his land in severalty, comes under the same law as his white neighbor, will probably in twenty years be well in advance of his Indian Territory brother, who, under existing conditions, can be neither one thing nor the other.