Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1881-09-02

The social and moral condition of the Lapps
must be placed very low in the human scale.
They have no recognized head man or chief,
and their priests have but little influence over
them. This however, is not at all strange,
for these priests are of different race and
oil feel more or less the habitual Norwegian
contempt for the Lapps. The clergy in these
regions always live in hope that their minis
trations may be speedily rewarded by living
in the south of Norway and they consequent
ly regard their stay in Finmarken merely as
temporary" hardship, and in reality exist
in thought and sympathy far away from the
poor Lapps. or course there are exceptions,
but these are few and far between. As a rule
the clergy are represented in Finmarken by
young, inexperienced men, who-perhaps
from pecuniary considerations, perhaps with
view to serving their apprenticeship in their
profession among people whose powers of
criticism are Of the lowest-consent to be
what they consider buried alive until the end
they have in view be accomplished Under
these circumstances the relations between
priest and people are very slender and preca-
rious, and from want of faith and trust on one
side, caused by want of sympathy on the 9TH
er, the Gospel is preached to unwilling ears
and thus, except in name and outwardy, the
natives are as far from Christianity as ever.
The moral condition of the Lapps is, as
known, but left Impractical, and the relation
between the sexes is on the freest footing.
This of course, is prejudicial to the long con-
tinuance of the Lapp race, which, already
now dwindling, will, it is feared, before many
years have rolled on, be a thing of the past.
Another reason favoring the supposition that
the Lapps are doomed 10 early extnction-the
usual fate of nomads or those who try to stem
the great tide of civilization-is that the Qu@ns
[arV V,nNt r..E Il
ready supplanting them everywhere. The
Queens, who mainly compose the population
of the towns on the east and north coasts of
Norway, are hard-working and more intelli-
gent-much better adapted for the higher
branches of manual labor than their Lapp
neighbors who never can and never will be
anything else than nomads. By no means
unconnected with the decline of the race is
the failure, or rather difficulty, of obtaining
sufficient reindeer moss during the winter
(Lapp and reindeer are so identified that it is
impossible to separate the two). Formerly
the deer were marched into Russian territory,
and there suffered to feed at will but the Rus
sian nomads, thinking their rights violated,
obtained law forbidding the crossing of the
frontier under pain of destruction of the
herds transgressing. One of the first results
of this was the establishment of a sort of
reign of terror on the frontier, with mutual
recrlmlnatlon ana slaughterlng OF nerds. One
poor Norsk Lapp strayed within the frontier
few hundred yards, was surprised, and was
forced to witness the slaughter of his 800 deer
his all; and he was thus reduced by one fell
stroke from affluence to poverty. Many such
instances occur, and, although it may be ap-
parently reasonable and even lawful to take
such stringent measures, yet taking into ac-
count the extreme length and unguardedness
of the frontier, and the consequent tempta-
tion to transgress which must come to a man
whose moral sense, on account of his train
ing, is not of the highest and who knows
that one thin, imaginary line is all that divides
him and his hungry herds from the richest
pastures-taking all this into account, one
cannot help sympathizing with the Norwe-
gans, and feeling that the Russian lawgivers
might have made some regulation more suit
able to the race and country for which it was
intended.
Thus it is but too certain that the Lapps
are doomed. Without religion, without art,
without single high or noble attribute, liv-
ing merely for the day and not looking be-
yond it, how can they long continue to block
the way for more able workers in this earthly
beehive? Further to the north they cannot
get, and therefore silently and slowly they
will disappear, and vanish forever from among
the peoples of the earth, leaving behind them
no mark-no sign to show that they have
| been.