It is so long now since they were the lords of our soil, and formidable as our enemies,—they are so utterly wasted away and helpless that we can afford to listen to the truth, and to believe that even our enemies had virtues. Man was created in the image of God, and it cannot be that any thing human is utterly vile and contemptible. To remain in ignorance and censure without knowledge is easier than to study and toil for the truth, but with the present facilities for digging, Christian people cannot be excused in remaining content with dross. Those who have always thought of Indians as roaming about in the forests, hunting and fishing or at war, will laugh, perhaps, at the idea of Indian homes and domestic happiness; yet there is no people of which we have any knowledge, among whom, in their primitive state, family ties and relationships were more distinctly defined or more religiously respected. The treatment which they received from the white people, whom they always considered as intruders, aroused and kept in exercise all their ferocious passions, so that none except those who mingled with them as missionaries or as captives, saw them in their true character—as they were to each other. Almost any portrait which we have of Indians, represents them with tomahawk and scalping knife in hand, as if they possessed no other but a barbarous nature. Christian nations might with equal justice be always represented with cannon and balls and swords and pistols, as the emblems of their employments and their prevailing tastes. The details of wars form far too great a portion of every history of civilized and barbarous nations; to conquer and to slay has been too long the glory of Christian people; he who has been most successful in subjugating and oppressing, in mowing down human beings, has too long worn the laurel crown,—been too long an object for the admiration of men and the love of woman. We are weary of the pomp and circumstance of war—of princely banquets and gay cavalcades. The time and space we bestow upon Kings and Courts, and the homage we pay to empty titles, are unworthy our professed Republican spirit and preferences. Let us turn aside from the war path and sit down by the hearth stone of peace. In the pictures which I shall give I shall confine myself principally to the Iroquois or Six Nations, a people who no more deserve the term savage, than we do that of heathen, because we have still lingering among us heathen superstitions, and many opinions and practices which deserve no better name! The cannibals of some of the West India Islands, and the islands of the Pacific, may with justice be termed savage, but a people like the Iroquois who had a government, established offices, a system of religion eminently pure and spiritual, a code of honor and laws of hospitality excelling those of all other nations, should be considered something better than savage, or utterly barbarous.