operation of the Indian Law. If the Indian who buys, and does not pay,
and who never intends to pay, were not exempted from the salutary lesson
which the distraint, at suit of a creditor, upon his goods, teaches,
he would not seek to evade payment of his debts.

If, again, the Indian were not regarded as one "childlike," shall I say,
"and bland" (no! I must dissever these words from the otherwise apt
quotation, as, though this be to proclaim how immeasurably he has fallen,
and to dissipate cherished popular beliefs about him, I conceive him to
be bland, without being so decreed by the law) there would be a manifest
accession to his fund of self-respect. The idea of holding him a minor,
and as one who cannot be kept to his engagements is a mistake, and its
effect is only to stimulate the dishonest bent of his nature, prompting
him to take advantage of his white brother in every conceivable way,
where the latter's business relations with him are concerned.




HIS RELIGION.


The pagan, though not so alive to the serene beauties of the Christian
life, and not so attracted by the power, the promises, and the assurances
of the Christian religion, as to evince the one, and embrace the other, or
to make trial of the moral safeguards that its armoury supplies, would yet
so honour, one would think, the persuasive Christian influences, operating
around him and about him in so many benign and kindly ways, as to abandon
many of the practices that savour of the superstition of a by-gone age.
Though there has been a decline, if not a positive discontinuance, of