as a reliable basis for judgment; and it would be manifestly unfair
to argue weak mental calibre, or to presage small mental capacity in
the Indian, from his present deplorable state of inertness, a condition
which has been sadly impressed and confirmed by repressive legislation,
and of which that legislation, by practically denying him occupation of
improving fields of thought, and, indeed, scope for any enlarged mental
activity, seeks to decree the melancholy perpetuity.

In some of the few cases where supervenient aid has enabled him to
qualify for, and embrace, a profession, I have perceived a tendency
to subordinate its practice to the demands of some less exacting
calling, which has rendered nugatory any efficient mastery of the
profession. Memory is, undoubtedly, the Indian's strong point, and I can
myself testify to exhibitions of it, truly phenomenal. The interpreter
will placidly proceed to translate a long string of sentences, just
fallen from a speaker's lips, to engraft which upon our memory would be
a performance most trying and difficult; and to have their repetition.
even with a proximate adherence to the sense and the expressions used,
imposed upon us, in the peremptory fashion in which it is sprung upon
the interpreter, would carry the wildest dismay to our mind. Those
understanding the Indian tongue have frequently assured me that the
Indian, when interpreting, reproduces with minuteness, if he be granted,
of course, a certain latitude for differences of idiom, the speaker's
thought and expressions. It is said by one of his own writers that the
Indian is much more prone to follow the evil than the moral practices
of the white; and there can be no doubt, I think, that, if habitually
thrown with a corrupt community, or one where a low order of morality
should obtain, the acquisition of higher knowledge would tend to make
him better skilled in planning works of iniquity, than to give him
higher and purer tastes. Actual experience of the Indian, in one or two