there? The future alone could tell. The mission, it must not be forgotten, had a double scope, half ecclesiastical, half political. The Jesuits had essayed a fearful task,--to convert the Iroquois to God and to the king, thwart the Dutch heretics of the Hudson, save souls from hell, avert ruin from Canada, and thus raise their order to a place of honor and influence both hard earned and well earned. The mission at Lake Onondaga was but a base of operations. Long before they were lodged and fortified here, Chaumonot and Ménard set out for the Cayugas, whence the former proceeded to the Senecas, the most numerous, and powerful of the five confederate nations; and in the following spring another mission was begun among the Oneidas. Their reception was not unfriendly; but such was the reticence and dissimulation of these inscrutable savages, that it was impossible to foretell results. The women proved, as might be expected, far more impressible than the men; and in them the fathers placed great hope; since in this, the most savage people of the continent, women held a degree of political influence never perhaps equalled in any civilized nation. * * Women, among the Iroquois, had a council of their own, which, according to Lafitau, who knew this people well, had the initiative in discussion, subjects presented by them being settled in the council of chiefs and elders. In this latter council the women had an orator, often of their own sex, to represent them. The matrons had a leading voice in determining the succession of chiefs. There were also female chiefs, one of whom, with her attendants, came to Quebec with an embassy in 1655 (Marie de l’Incarnation). In the torture of prisoners, great deference was paid to the judgment of the women, who, says Champlain, were thought more skilful and subtle than the men. The learned Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, dwells at length on the resemblance of the Iroquois to the ancient Lycians, among whom, according to Grecian writers, women were in the ascendant. “Gynecocracy, or the rule of women,” continues Lafitau, “which was the foundation of the Lycian government, was probably common in early times to nearly all the barbarous people of Greece” Mœurs des Sauvages, I. 460.