Who were the savages? and how did the English expect the Indians, under such a course of tuition, to become civilized? This was the state of things in the south. In the north, not a war broke out between England and France, but the same scenes were acting between the English American settlements and Canada. In 1692 we find Captain Ingoldsby haranguing the chiefs of the Five Nations at Albany, and exhorting them to “keep the enemy in perpetual alarm by the incursions of parties into their country.” And the Indian orator shrewdly replying—“Brother Corlear (their name for the governor of New York) is it not to secure your frontiers? Why, then, not one word of your people that are to join us? We will carry the war into the heart of the enemy’s country—but, brother Corlear, how comes it that none of our brethren, fastened in the same chain with us, offer their hand in this general war? Pray, Corlear, how come Maryland, Delaware River, and New England to be disengaged? Do they draw their arms out of the chain? or has the great king commanded that the few subjects he has in this place should make war against the French alone?”[45] It was not always, however, that the Indians had to complain that the English urged them into slaughter of the French and did not accompany them. The object of England in America now became that of wresting Canada entirely from France. For this purpose, knowing how essential it was to the success of this enterprise that they should not only have the Indians well affected, so as to prevent any incursions of the French Indians into their own states while the British forces were all concentrated on Canada, and still more how absolutely necessary to have a large body of Indians to pioneer the way for them through the woods, without which their army would be sure to be cut off by the French Indians—great endeavours were now made to conclude treaties of peace and mutual aid with all the great tribes in the British American colonies. Such treaties had long existed with the Five Nations, now called the Six Nations, by the addition of the remainder of the Tuscarora Indians who had escaped from our exterminating arms in North Carolina, and fled to the Five Nations; and also with the Delaware and Susquehanna Indians. Conferences were held with the chiefs of these tribes and British Commissioners from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York and Virginia, and, ostensibly, a better spirit was manifested towards the Indian people. The most celebrated of these conferences were held at Philadelphia in 1742; at Lancaster in Pennsylvania in 1744; and at Albany, in the state of New York, in 1746. The details of the conferences developed many curious characteristics both of the white and the red men. Canassateego, an Onondaga chief, was the principal speaker for the Indians on all these occasions, and it would be difficult to point to the man in any country, however civilized and learned, who has conducted national negotiations with more ability,