hunted and fished for subsistence; they were as foul, greasy, and
unsavory as the rest; yet in them, withal, was often seen a native
dignity of bearing, which ochre and bear's grease could not hide, and
which comported well with their strong, symmetrical, and sometimes
majestic proportions.

To the institutions, traditions, rites, usages, and festivals of the
league the Iroquois was inseparably wedded. He clung to them with Indian
tenacity; and he clings to them still. His political fabric was one of
ancient ideas and practices, crystallized into regular and enduring
forms. In its component parts it has nothing peculiar to itself.
All its elements are found in other tribes: most of them belong to the
whole Indian race. Undoubtedly there was a distinct and definite effort
of legislation; but Iroquois legislation invented nothing. Like all
sound legislation, it built of materials already prepared. It organized
the chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself.
The people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and
kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate
Iroquois looks back with a mournful pride to the glory of the past.

Would the Iroquois, left undisturbed to work out their own destiny,
ever have emerged from the savage state? Advanced as they were beyond
most other American tribes, there is no indication whatever of a tendency
to overpass the confines of a wild hunter and warrior life. They were
inveterately attached to it, impracticable conservatists of barbarism,
and in ferocity and cruelty they matched the worst of their race.
Nor did the power of expansion apparently belonging to their system ever
produce much result. Between the years 1712 and 1715, the Tuscaroras,
a kindred people, were admitted into the league as a sixth nation; but
they were never admitted on equal terms. Long after, in the period of