_Onondaga and Oneida Indians._—There are in the State of New York eight Indian reservations, aggregating 86,336 acres of land, a little less than 18 acres to each of the 5,093 Indians who occupy them. These lands are held by tribal and not individual titles. A few of these Indians have become thrifty farmers, but the most of them are idle and poor; probably one-half are still pagans. A bill has been introduced into the Legislature to abolish, with consent of the Indians, the treaty of 1788, and distribute these lands in severalty to these people. This would end the fatal communal system, which has proved in this, as it must in all cases, so deadly to all prosperity. Each Indian would thus become, under the laws of the State, a land-owner, and amenable to the laws on the same footing as other citizens. Under the present tribal system, the father has nothing but his tomahawk and scalping knife to leave to his children, and transmits only a disposition to use them. Give him the right to acquire a title to something else, and he will doubtless acquire and bequeath it. * * * * * There is a poor blind Samson in this land, Shorn of his strength and hound in bands of steel, Who may in some grim revel, raise his hand, And shake the pillars of this commonweal, Till the vast temple of our liberties A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies. That same “blind Samson” is in the land to-day. It is the Negro, uneducated, immoral, with a ballot in his hand. It is the white man, uneducated, immoral, with a ballot in his hand. For it makes no difference. The harm lies back of the color. The consequences of ignorant suffrage, by whomsoever exercised, can be only detrimental to the peace and welfare of the State. Free institutions can be built up only on the basis of intelligence and integrity. Without intelligence and integrity, the best cannot long survive. If there be large numbers on whom this right has been conferred, but who are densely ignorant, especially if these large numbers are grouped in a single section, like these millions of negroes and poor whites in the South, it is an official notice served on the nation that no time is to be lost in imparting the mental and moral training requisite for the right discharge of these sacred functions of voting. Men are not left to settle this question of helping with schools and churches, merely on the ground of humanity or Christian duty. Their interest is challenged, and their very selfishness is under contribution. We do not put matches in children’s hands, and then leave them to play about hay-mows. If we give them matches we train them in the use of them. With an instrument in his hands so potent as the ballot, and with the possibility of using the leverage of it in contingencies easy to be foreseen for the overturning of the nation, it takes but half an eye to see that the man who wields it ought to have an instructed mind and an