northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat.  How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape?  In the northeast of Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary.  In Alaska, on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to its bosom.  In between these two come the people we are studying.  The Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not Episcopalians.  What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one?  Heathens?  The question sets us thinking.

The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as “Any irreligious, rude, barbarous or unthinking class or person.”  This Eskimo is not “irreligious,” for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death, and he accedes to Kipling’s line without ever having heard it,—­“They that are good shall be happy.”  He is not “rude,” but exceedingly courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude.  “Unthinking” he certainly is not.  Six months’ darkness within the igloo gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated cobbler is your true philosopher.

There remains but the one ear-mark, “barbarous.”  The dictionary declares that barbarous means, “not classical or pure,” “showing ignorance of arts and civilisation.”  On the first of these indictments our poor Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical.  And what man dare pronounce on the purity of another?  Then we come to “arts” and “civilisation.”  In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every European who has visited him.  The stumbling-block in this honest search for a tag to put on my people is the term “civilisation.”  One is reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons:  “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man’s doxy.”  Was it not Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, “I am conscious that life has been trying to civilise me for now seventy years with what seems to me very inadequate results”?

If “Christianity” with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man’s church, and “civilising” means bringing him into close contact with white men’s lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but little to thank the second for.  Two years ago eighty of these people in one tribe died of measles, a white man’s disease.  A stray chaplain wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling ship.  He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates, and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost.  They were not interested.  Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing.  “Where is it?  Tell us, that we may go!” and little and big they clambered over him, eager for details.