For instance: “Upon the banks of the St. Lawrence there are several little Indian villages. The cleared land is rarely, I may almost say never, cultivated, nor are any inroads made in the forest for such a purpose. The soil is, nevertheless, fertile, and, were it not, manure lies in heaps by their houses. Were every family to inclose half an acre of ground, till it, and plant it in potatoes and maize, it would yield a sufficiency to support them one half the year. They suffer, too, every now and then, extreme want, insomuch that, joined to occasional intemperance, it is rapidly reducing their numbers. This, to us, so strange apathy proceeds not, in any great degree, from repugnance to labor; on the contrary, they apply very diligently to it when its reward is immediate. It is evidently not the necessary labor that is the obstacle to more extended culture, but the distant return from that labor. I am assured, indeed, that among some of the more remote tribes, the labor thus expended much exceeds that given by the whites. On the Indian, succeeding years are too distant to make sufficient impression; though, to obtain what labor may bring about in the course of a few months, he toils even more assiduously than the white man.” This view of things is confirmed by the experience of the Jesuits, in their interesting efforts to civilize the Indians of Paraguay. The real difficulty was the improvidence of the people; their inability to think for the future; and the necessity accordingly of the most unremitting and minute superintendence on the part of their instructors. “Thus at first, if these gave up to them the care of the oxen with which they plowed, their indolent thoughtlessness would probably leave them at evening still yoked to the implement. Worse than this, instances occurred where they cut them up for supper, thinking, when reprehended, that they sufficiently excused themselves by saying they were hungry.”