As to many of the tribes, however, little can be said and that little is not to their credit. They have no higher conception of life than that which is wholly animalistic. Through all the long ages, with them a physical act has been merely a physical act. It has had no moral significance. And can the idea of untold ages be easily eradicated? And, after all, are they worse than other people? Comparisons are odious. But it must be remembered that these natives live out their lives thus _thinking no evil_! What, then, of the white man, born with the knowledge of the moral significance which is attached to the personal relationship and who has permitted himself to become degraded by the vices of civilization? The native man is _un_moral. The white man is _im_moral. There is a difference! Moreover, the Scarlet Letter is not alone for the Hester Prynnes of Old Plymouth. From time immemorial among some of the tribes of the North the unchaste Eskimo woman has been forced to wear a sign of her degradation,--a green band in her hair. However, unlike Hester Prynne, she is given another chance, albeit an unfair one. If she gives birth to an able-bodied boy she becomes an object of unusual and sincere respect and her green band becomes, as it were, a crown. Humanity itself, in the Far North, sometimes becomes quite as cold and frozen as the land itself. But there is one thing which never fails to thaw it,--children. And any one who lives long in the north country can not but realize that children are of vital necessity in any sparsely-settled land. The Reverend Hudson Stuck, to whose admirable volume, _Voyages on the Yukon_, reference has already been made, relates a good story bearing on this point. Long residence in Alaska has taught him much that has never yet been writ in books and has made of him, although a man of the strictest religious convictions, kindly tolerant of the frailties of humankind. Above all else, he is impatient, as we all are, of the non-essentials in education which are being crammed down the throats of the natives by teachers, often due to youth and inexperience, while the essentials, the things of real value to them as individuals and to the country as a whole, are neglected. The Archdeacon relates that once he visited a Mission where the man in charge, a youth, with misguided enthusiasm, boasted that there was neither a half-breed nor an illegitimate child in the village! The Archdeacon received the information in silence, but after a tour of inspection he returned to the subject. "I see no children at all," he remarked. "Aren't there any?" The young man proudly admitted that there were none,--whereupon the Archdeacon proceeded to shock him.