Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/163

CORRESPONDENCE 151 the opening of God's providence to give the commerce of Asia and the Pacific Isles into the hands of that nation which has displayed the banner of liberty to the nations of the earth and which is first of all nations in giving the Bible and the de- voted missionary to Jew and Gentile sunk in degradation and reduced to a stupidity of which the heathen gods are too fit an illustration? I leave others to tell the growing numbers which crowd every steamer and clipper ship up from Califor- nia. It is sufficient for me to say that Oregon now numbers between 30,000 and 40,000 American citizens and it is a mod- erate estimate to predict that she will double her population every two years for the next quarter of a century. 311 Who then will give the bread of life to the thousands hastening to our borders ? Who are to build our schoolhouses and put our rising generations under the tuition of pious, effi- cient teachers instead of leaving them to the sport of all the baser passions of the human soul, while schools of vice are everywhere spreading wide their desolating, debasing influence over the unsuspecting and unguarded youthful mind ? To me it seems just as important that the missionary school teacher should accompany the home missionary to the frontier settle- ments of all our new territories as that the foreign missionary should be attended with such auxiliaries. I have felt for years that the right arm of the Home Mission Society is measurably palsied by attempting to separate these essential constituents. If the church is commissioned to go and teach all nations, why should not the youthful mind be imbued with the principles of the gospel in all its acquisitions ? I have no doubt our brethren at home who contribute liberally to sustain the missionary in these new and opening fields desire and pray that this cause may want none of the agencies necessary to crown the efforts with complete success. Why then should not the Home Mis- sion Society assume the responsibility at once of seeing at least one school sustained by efficient, pious teachers in each of the 311 This prediction was hardly fulfilled. The Federal census gave Oregon in 1850 a population of 13,294; in 1860 it gave Oregon and Washington, which then included part of Idaho, 64,000, and in 1870 it gave the three states and terri- tories 130,000.