Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/108

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100 T. W. DAVENPORT. by the application of any civil service or humanitarian rules, but appointed on account of partizan service, wholly at vari- ance with the benevolent designs of the Government. About 1870, the agency system had become so rotten that the Grant administration was persuaded to accept agents se- lected by the churches, but this did not appear to be any improvement. The churches did not apply the proper tests. Agents were .selected on account of religion, or rather belief ; a substitution of church service for political service. The real test was still partizan. But religious profession has small influence upon the civilizing process, as relates to Indians, which is mainly industrial; neither is it an assurance against the peculations of politicians. After the failure of the church experiment, the Government had recourse to the army, whose officers were assumed to be above sharp practices. But this move was met by the combined opposition of the politicians in Congress, as it curtailed their means for rewarding the personal service of friends. So the army, in this connection, is without praise or blame. Though my experience at the Umatilla was short, too short in fact to speak of it as conclu- sive evidence of the soundness of my views upon the Indian question, yet the responses to my experiments left me no room to doubt that Indians must travel the same road up to social and industrial competence, that all successful races have traveled before them. Indeed, I can conceive of no other process except that which tends to make the individual man an active, energetic and intellectual factor of industrialism. How to accomplish it is the problem. Setting an example, though good, is wholly insufficient, as the past experience has abundantly proven. The Indian must be more than an eye witness. He must be the doer, and to make him so, he needs more stimulus than a man who has passed beyond the hunting, fishing and maraud- ing stage of existence and its feverish excitements. He is not lacking in a game of baseball, and other physical contests involving his pride and faculties of emulation. And is there