A chief of the Six Nations, in a speech delivered before the commissioners of the Tinted States at Fort Stanwix, in 1788, said: "The avidity of the white people for land and the thirst of the Indians for spirituous liquors were equally insatiable; that the white men had seen and fixed their eyes upon the Indian's good land, and the Indians had seen nothing and fixed their eyes on the white man's keg of rum. And therefore could divert either of them from their desired object; and there was no remedy but that the while men must have the land and the Indians the keg of rum." The Indian character has always been a matter of the most varied accounts and estimates. While there is no room for disagreement or misunderstanding about its more prominent separate traits, views of it in its general aspect are extremely divergent, ami extensive as is the literature bearing upon this subject there exists no single presentation of the Indian character in its proportions, at least from a

familiar pen, that entirely rills and satisfies tin- mind. Longfellow's " Hiawatha " and Cooper's Indian actions bring out the romantic and heroic phases; but no powerful conception of the Indian type, except in the department of song and story, has yet been given to literature. There is one safe starting point, and only one, for a correctly balanced estimate of the Indian. He was essentially a physical being. Believing both in a supreme good deity and an evil spirit, and also in an existence after death, religion was not, however, a predominating factor and influence in his life and institutions. In this respect he differed from most aboriginal and peculiar types. Of a stolid, stoical, and phlegmatic nature, possessing little imagination, he was neither capable of spiritual exaltation nor characteristically subject to superstitious awe and fear.