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For what Magna Charta is to the Englishman, what the Constitution is to us, is the Great Peace to an Iroquois; and their gratitude, their intense reverence and love for its founder, Hiawatha, is like no sentiton

Now that the Revolution had split the Great Peace, which is the Iroquois League, the larger portion of the nation had followed Brant to Canada--all the Caniengas, the greater part of the Onondaga nation, all the Cayugas, the one hundred and fifty of our own Oneidas And though the Senecas did not desert their western post as keepers of the shattered gate in a house divided against itself, they acted with the Mohawks; the Onondagas had brought their waa, and a new council-fire was kindled in Canada as rallying-place of a great people in process of final disintegration

It was sad to me who loved them, who knew them first as firm allies of New York province, who understood them, their true character, their history and tradition, their intih I stood with those whom they struck heavily, and who in turn struck theh, I bear witness before God that they were not by nature the fiends and demons our historians have painted, not by instinct the violent and ferocious scourges that the painted Tories made of these children of the forest, who for five hundred years had formed a confederacy whose sole object was peace

I speak not of the brutal and degraded gens de prairie--the horse-riding savages of the West, whose primal instincts are to torture the helpless and to violate woonquin, no Lenni-Lenape can be charged with But I speak for the gens de bois--the forest Indians of the East, and of those who ue, which was but a powerful tribunal i peace upon half a continent

Left alone to themselves, unharassed by men of my blood and color, they are a kindly and affectionate people, full of sympathy for their friends in distress, considerate of their woers, anxious for peace, and profoundly reverent where their League or its founders were concerned

Centuries of warfare for self-preservation have made them efficient in the arts of war Ferocity, craft, and deception, practised on theht therafted qualities which we have recorded as their distinguishing traits, no enuine character than war-paint and shaven head display the custo their own people The cruelties of war are not peculiar to any one people; and God knows that in all the Iroquois confederacy no savage could be found to ham, or Major Bromfield--no atrocities could obscure the atrocities in the prisons and prison-ships of New York, the deeds of the Butlers, of Crysler, of Beacraft, and of Bettys