There seems ground to question whether the substitution of a smattering of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three great languages, when all little tongues will be extinct and all little peoples swallowed up, when all costume will be reduced to a dead level of blue jeans and shoddy and all strange customs abolished. The world will be a much less interesting world then; the spice and savour of the ends of the earth will be gone. Nor does it always appear unquestionable that the world will be the better or the happier. The advance of civilisation would be a great thing to work for if we were quite sure what we meant by it and what its goal is. To the ordinary government school-teacher in Alaska, with some notable exceptions, it seems to mean chiefly teaching the Indians to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. and teaching the women to wear millinery, with a contemptuous attitude toward the native language and all native customs. The less intelligent grade of missionary sometimes falls into the same easy rut. So letters pass through the post-offices addressed: "Mr. Pretty Henry," "Mrs. Monkey Bill," "Miss Sally Shortandirty"; so, occasionally, the grotesque spectacle may present itself, to the passengers on a steamer, of a native woman in a "Merry Widow" hat and a blood-stained parkee gutting salmon on the river bank. The nobler ideal, as it seems to some of us, is to labour for God-fearing, self-respecting Indians rather than imitation white men and white women. An Indian who is honest, healthy and kindly, skilled in hunting and trapping, versed in his native Bible and liturgy, even though he be entirely ignorant of English and have acquired no taste for canned fruit and know not when Columbus discovered America, may be very much of a man in that station of life in which it has pleased God to call him.