which they soon discovered, and know very well how to take advantage of it. Placed between us and the English, they soon conceived that both nations would be obliged to court them; and it is certain that the principal attention of both colonies, since their settlement, has been to gain them or at least to engage them to remain neuter.'[13] [Footnote 12: _Conspiracy of Pontiac_ (1885 ed.), vol. i, chap. i, p. 21. Charlevoix says: 'All their forces joined together have never amounted to more than 5,000 or 6,000 fighting men' (_Letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguières_, Engl. tr., London, 1763, p. 185). On the other hand, in _A Concise Account of North America_, by Major Robert Rogers (London, 1765), p. 206, it is stated that 'when the English first settled in America they (the Iroquois) could raise 15,000 fighting men.'] [Footnote 13: Charlevoix, as above, pp. 184-5.] [Sidenote: _Their strength of character and policy._] A strong race the Iroquois were. In cruelty and endurance, in bold conception and swift execution, they had few, if any, rivals among the natives of North America, and in their grasp of something like state policy they had no equals. As savages, pure and simple, they reached the highest level; they might indeed have had a greater and more lasting future, if their level had not been so high. The Kaffir races of South Africa in our own time have produced good {58} fighting material; some of their leaders have shown skilful generalship and no small statecraft; but they have been loosely knit together, little bound as a whole by the ties of country or of kin; and from this very weakness has come their salvation, in that they could and can be recast in a new mould. It was not so with the North American Indians, least of all with the Iroquois. They were stereotyped in savagery, and, when the white men came among them, it was too late for them to change; but, as savages of the most ferocious type, as ruthless murdering hunters of men, they developed an organization which was evidence at once of intellectual and physical strength, and of a wild kind of moral discipline. [Sidenote: _Their political organization._]