After thus stating the circumstances which qualified him to give an opinion on the subject of Indian civilization, he asserts that the efforts of religious missionaries have not met, in the long run, with any apparent success. Nor does he seem to think very differently of the result of two Romanist Missions, of which glowing and animated accounts were published some years ago. “The Catholics,” he observes, “have caused many to hang a crucifix around their necks, which they show as they do their medals and other ornaments; but this too often is all that they have to mark them as Christians. I have conversed with many travellers that have been over the stony mountains into the Great Missionary Settlements of St. Peter and St. Paul. These travellers,—and some of them were professed Catholics,—unite in affirming that the converts will escape from their mission whenever it is in their power, fly into their native deserts, and resume at once their old modes of life. The vast empire of the Jesuits, in Paraguay, has all passed away, and, we are told, the descendants of their convert Indians are no way distinguished from the other savages. It strikes me that Christianity is the religion of civilized man, that the savages must first be civilized, and that as there is little hope that the present generation of Indians can be civilized, there is but little more that they will be Christianized.”[85] To the foregoing I will add the testimony of Sir Francis Bond Head, who, in one of his despatches to Lord Glenelg, thus depicts the effects which have resulted from the efforts of the missionaries. “Whenever and wherever the two races come in contact it is sure to prove fatal to the red man. However bravely for a short time he may resist our bayonets and fire arms, sooner or later he is called upon by death to submit to his decree. If we stretch forth the hand of friendship, the liquid fire it offers him to drink proves still more destructive than our wrath; and lastly if we attempt to Christianize the Indians, and for that sacred object congregate them in villages of substantial log houses, lovely and beautiful as such a theory appears, it is an undeniable fact, to which I unhesitatingly add my humble testimony, that as soon as the hunting season commences, the men (from warm clothes and warm houses having lost their hardihood) perish, or rather rot in numbers by consumption; _whilst, as regards their women, it is impossible for any accurate observer to refrain from remarking that civilization, in spite of the pure, honest, and unremitting zeal of our missionaries, by some accursed process has blanched their babies faces; in short, our philanthropy, like our friendship, has failed in its professions_.… I believe that every person of sound mind in this country, who is disinterested in their conversion, and who is acquainted with the Indian character will agree