fire, this was regarded as a survival of a custom decidedly "more honored in the breach than the observance"; from a state of at least partial equality with the men, she was soon, by the altered circumstances of her race, reduced to a condition of abject slavery and degradation. The changed conditions were powerful over the nature as well as the status of the Indian woman. The colonists always insisted most strenuously upon the natural cruelty of the Indians; but we must remember that this was not a quality confined to barbarism, since even in the days of the first colonists the Inquisition was an established institution, while the tortures practised in England during the reign of "Good Queen Bess" might have seemed to the most enthusiastic Indian warrior too cruel to be used by him on his worst enemy. There can, however, be no question that the Indians, like so many other primitive peoples, delighted in torture of their foes--though they did not emulate their white fellows by torturing a man because he happened to differ from them in a matter of theory. Now it has been seen in the case of Pocahontas that it was a custom of the women to interfere to save the lives of prisoners; and the existence of such a well-defined custom argues a certain tender-heartedness among the women. Under the new conditions of constant strife, however, this "quality of mercy" became a thing of the past. It is the nature of woman to be enthusiastic in evil as in good; and it soon came about that it was the women of the Indians who were the most bloodthirsty and cruel of their race. It was they who heaped the foulest insults upon a captive enemy, who most delighted in the most terrible torture of that foe, who were best pleased if his agony extorted from him the tribute of a groan. This indulgence in the most depraved instincts of the animal nature of course reacted. The women of the Amerinds lost all the distinctively feminine characteristics that they had ever possessed, and with them even their slight influence upon the men of their race. These saw in their women the evidences of a lower nature than their own, instead of one higher, and so they calmly and justly relegated those who were developing toward animalism to the level of an animal. The rule was not invariable; but it was general. There still remained a few "mothers in Israel," women who by force of character maintained some influence in their tribes; but, as a rule, the squaw was a mere beast of burden, a mere "breeder of sinners." The facility in adaptation to conditions which has always been one of woman's prominent traits had proved fatal to the status and nature of the Amerind woman.