antiquities?--These are inquiries, which you, at least, may aim to
answer.

No branch of the human family is an object unworthy of high philosophic
inquiry. Their food, their language, their arts, their physical
peculiarities, and their mental traits, are each topics of deep
interest, and susceptible of being converted into evidences of high
importance. Mistaken our Red Men clearly were, in their theories and
opinions on many points. They were wretched theologists, and poor
casuists. But not more so, in three-fourths of their dogmas, than the
disciples of Zoroaster, or Confucius. They were polytheists from their
very position. And yet, there is a general idea, that under every form,
they acknowledged but one DIVINE INTELLIGENCE under the name of the
GREAT SPIRIT.

They paid their sacrifices, or at least, respects, to the imaginary and
phantastic gods of the air, the woods and water, as Greece and Rome had
done, and done as blindly before them. But they were a vigorous, hardy
and brave off-shoot of the original race of man. They were full of
humanities. They had many qualities to command admiration. They were
wise in council, they were eloquent in the defence of their rights. They
were kind and humane to the weak, bewildered and friendless. Their
lodge-board was ever ready for the way farer. They were constant to a
proverb, in their _professed_ friendships. They never forgot a kind act.
Nor can it be recorded, to their dispraise, that they were a terror to
their enemies. Their character was formed on the military principle, and
to acquire distinction in this line, they roved over half the continent.
They literally carried their conquests from the gulf of St. Lawrence to
the gulf of Mexico. Few nations have ever existed, who have evinced more
indomitable courage or hardihood, or shown more devotion to the spirit
of independence than the Iroquois.

But all their efforts would have ended in disappointment, had it not
been for that principle of confederation, which, at an early day,
pervaded their councils, and converted them into a phalanx, which no
other tribe could successfully penetrate, or resist. It is this trait,
by which they are most distinguished from the other hunter nations of
North America; and it is to their rigid adherence to the verbal compact,
which bound them together, as tribes and clans, that they owe their
present celebrity, and owed their former power.

It is proposed to inquire into the principles