the warrior displayed the customary
guise in which he appeared among his own people. The cruelties of war,
when war is a struggle for national existence, are common to all races.
The persistent desire for peace, pursued for centuries in federal unions,
and in alliances and treaties with other nations, has been manifested by
few as steadily as by the countrymen of Hiawatha. The sentiment of
universal brotherhood, which directed their polity, has never been so
fully developed in any branch of the Aryan race, unless it may be found
incorporated in the religious quietism of Buddha and his followers.

To come back to our first proposition,--it is unquestionable that the
Iroquois, when they framed the political system which exhibited this
singular force of intellect and elevation of character, were a people of
the Stone Age; and there is no good reason for supposing that they were
superior in character and capacity to the people of the most primitive
times. What we know of them entitles us to affirm that the makers of the
earliest flint implements may have been equal, if not superior, in
natural powers to the members of any existing race. And as language is
the outgrowth and image of the mental faculties, it is not impossible, or
even unlikely, that among the languages spoken by the people of those
early ages, there may have been some as far superior in construction and
power of expression to any tongue of modern Europe, as the languages of
the barbarous Greeks and Germans, a thousand years before the Christian
era, were superior to the speech of the highly civilized Egyptians.

The conclusions to which these facts and reasonings point are of great
scientific importance. As there could be no sound astronomy while the
notion prevailed that the earth was the centre of the universe, and no
science of history while each nation looked with contempt upon every
other people, so we can hope for no complete and satisfying science of
man and of human speech until our minds are disabused of those other
delusions of self-esteem which would persuade us that superior culture
implies superior capacity, and that the particular race and language
which we happen to claim as our own are the best of all races and
languages.

[Printed at the SALEM PRESS, Nov., 1881.]

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIAWATHA AND THE IROQUOIS
CONFEDERATION***

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