Most readers of the story of the Huron missions will study it mainly as an episode in religious enterprise. They will note the heroism of the Jesuit priests--their faithfulness unto death, their constancy under torture and suffering not surpassed by the stoicism of the North American Indians themselves. They will mourn the failure of their efforts, the butchery, the martyrdom, but will record that all was not absolutely thrown away; for even in the lodges of the Five Nations we read that some of the nameless Hurons held to the faith which their French teachers loved and served so well. But this is not the true moral of the story. The significance of the events lay in proving the French to be weak and the Iroquois to be strong, in demonstrating with horrible thoroughness that the white men in Canada were powerless to protect their friends, in thus making more difficult what was difficult enough already, in retarding the progress of {90} European colonization in Canada. The want of concentration, the attempt to do too much, the somewhat paralysing influence of the particular form of the Christian religion which the French brought with them--all these elements of weakness came out in connexion with the Huron missions; and meanwhile precious years were lost to France which could not be afterwards made good; for in these same years the English, not producing martyrs and heroes, so much as fathers of families, were taking firm root in North American soil, plodding slowly but surely along the road to colonization. [Sidenote: _The strength and ferocity of the Iroquois._] The Iroquois were like man-eating tigers. The taste of human blood whetted their appetite for more. Fresh from the slaughter of the Hurons, in 1650-1 they fell upon the Neutral Nation, whose home was on the northern shore of Lake Erie, stretching to the east across the Niagara river. The Neutrals had held aloof from Iroquois and Huron alike, whence their name; but their neutrality did not protect them from utter extermination at the hands of the Five Nations. Over against them on the southern side of the lake were the Eries, second to none as ferocious savages, and known to the French as the 'Nation of the Cats.' Their turn came next, in 1654-5. They fought hard, behind palisades and with poisoned arrows; but they too were blotted out, and only on the south were left native warriors to cope with the conquering Iroquois. These were the Andastes, on the line of the Susquehanna river, who year after year gave blow for blow, until they too succumbed to superior numbers.