The Indian has little hope of occupying a sphere, where the discipline
and cultivation of the mind shall be essential to the proper balancing
and developing of its powers, and shall render it equal to the collision
with other keen intellects. It would, therefore, be equally idle and
unprofitable to attempt to measure his mental capabilities, until we
shall have experience of his intellectuality, with proper stimulating
and inciting influences in play, or under circumstances, conducing,
generally, to mental strength and vigor, to note; and which we may employ
as a reliable basis for judgment; and it would be manifestly unfair
to argue weak mental calibre, or to presage small mental capacity in
the Indian, from his present deplorable state of inertness, a condition
which has been sadly impressed and confirmed by repressive legislation,
and of which that legislation, by practically denying him occupation of
improving fields of thought, and, indeed, scope for any enlarged mental
activity, seeks to decree the melancholy perpetuity.
In some of the few cases where supervenient aid has enabled him to
qualify for, and embrace, a profession, I have perceived a tendency
to subordinate its practice to the demands of some less exacting
calling, which has rendered nugatory any efficient mastery of the
profession. Memory is, undoubtedly, the Indian's strong point, and I can
myself testify to exhibitions of it, truly phenomenal. The interpreter
will placidly proceed to translate a long string of sentences, just
fallen from a speaker's lips, to engraft which upon our memory would be
a performance most trying and difficult; and to have their repetition.
even with a proximate adherence to the sense and the expressions used,
imposed upon us, in the peremptory fashion in which it is sprung upon
the interpreter, would carry the wildest dismay to our mind. Those
understanding the Indian tongue have frequently assured me that the
Indian, when interpreting, reproduces with minuteness, if he be granted,
of course, a certain latitude for differences of idiom, the speaker's
thought and expressions. It is said by one of his own writers that the
Indian is much more prone to follow the evil than the moral practices
of the white; and there can be no doubt, I think, that, if habitually
thrown with a corrupt community, or one where a low order of morality
should obtain, the acquisition of higher knowledge would tend to make
him better skilled in planning works of iniquity, than to give him
higher and purer tastes. Actual experience of the Indian, in one or two
cases, where there has been a more than common accession to his mental
accomplishments, rather gives color to the notion of the misdirection
of those accomplishments (even without the baneful white influence)
that has been hinted at.
I should think the Indian would, probably, even with proper discipline
to bear, lack powers of concentration, with the kindred faculty of being
able to direct the mind to the achieving or subserving of some one grand
purpose or aim, and would, likely, be deficient in other allied ways,
by which a gifted and powerful mind will be asserted; and would imagine,
on the whole, that there is slight ground for thinking him capable,
under the most favourable circumstances, of imperilling the eminence of
the white in respect of intellectual power and attainments.