Few of the superior white race would think of looking to the Indian for examples of self-restraint, but I can give them here one of the most marked examples in history. Before the advent of the white man in America the various aboriginal tribes roamed over the plains, the mountains, the foothills, and in the forests, and with snare and trap, gin and bow and arrow caught or slew the game needed for food. These tribes were often hostile to each other; they trespassed on each other’s hunting-grounds, and in consequence, often fought in deadly wars which came nigh to exterminating some of them. They were not regardful, therefore, one would think, of the rights or needs of others than themselves to the game they hunted; and it is absurd (so the school-books would tell us) to assume that they would be provident or careful to preserve game for the future. Hence they would slay ruthlessly (the same authorities would doubtless declare), indifferent as to the days to come and their future needs, merely seeking food for to-day, and gorging upon it to repletion. In this case, however, the school-books would be wrong. In the hundreds or thousands of years that the Indians controlled this great continent they never once “killed out” any one of their hunting-fields. When the white race appeared upon the scene, game of every kind,—fish, flesh, and fowl,—was plentiful. Trappers and hunters went up and down the Then came the master mind of an Astor who valued money more than the future. What did it matter to him that game of a hundred kinds disappeared from the face of the earth provided he could make a fortune? What cared he that men and women would starve in the days to come so long as he could pile up his hoard of pelts, and sell them to add to his wealth? Modern commercialism, that damned and damning spirit of our civilization that sees nothing but dollars, that would shut out the glory of the sun rather than miss the ten-cent piece close at hand, entered into the game. Then the sportsman and the pot hunter of the white race came also, and between them and the Buffalo Bills who shot down buffaloes by the thousand for food to supply the builders of the transcontinental railways, in half a generation they cleared the prairies of the millions of noble buffaloes which used to roam in vast herds, left nothing but slender bands or solitary animals of the moose and elk, and drove these into almost inaccessible solitudes for self-preservation, and nearly stripped the country of deer, antelope, wild turkeys, and sage hens. Then they passed laws to protect “game,” making a close season so that the Indians, who, in their days of freedom To most people the Indian is a careless creature, content if his belly is filled to-day, improvident for the future, and therefore unwise, unthoughtful, and to be condemned. May it not be in this apparent carelessness for the future the Indian is wiser than we, that he is deliberately exercising a beneficial restraint? Think of the wild hurly-burly of our struggle to accumulate, and then consider the expense, the worry, the endless care of protecting that which we have accumulated. One far wiser than the sages of to-day once declared that we were to “take no thought for the morrow,” and in His whole teaching and life reprobated the struggle for wealth, and the life of selfish ease that comes with its attainment. One of the greatest curses of our present age and The Indian knows well the lesson that physical health comes only by the exercise of the body, therefore he definitely refuses any course of life that would prevent it; he welcomes for himself, his wife, his sons, and his daughters physical work; he also knows that mental and spiritual improvement come only by the exercise of mental and spiritual faculties, and he shuns everything that stultifies them. Did he know English, he could sing with Thomas Gray: “From toil he wins his spirits light, From busy day the peaceful night: Rich, from the very want of wealth, In heaven’s best treasures, peace and health.” And he puts into practical life what another of our sages well expressed when he said: “Occupation and exercise are the hand-maidens of purity and strength.” Too often we merely read these wise words. The Indian lives them. In this the white race can well Now, while the specific acts of restraint of the Indian may not appeal to me, the spirit of them is much needed by our whole race. Self-restraint, self-denial, self-control, Browning thoroughly believed in this spirit of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, self-control. In his Rabbi Ben Ezra he preaches some strong doctrines. Nothing is more needed to-day than the following robust and forceful words put into practical every-day living: “Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth’s smoothness rough, Each sting that bids, not sit, nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain, Strive and hold cheap the strain, Learn, never mind the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!” |