A CONSTITUTIONAL LEAGUE OF PEACE IN THE 

 STONE AGE OF AMERICA. 



THE LEAGUE OF THE IROQUOIS AND ITS CONSTITUTION. 



By. J. N. B. Hewitt. 

 Bureau of American Ethnology. 



In the Stone Age of America the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the 

 Oneida, the Cayuga, and the Seneca, five Iroquoian tribes dwelling 

 in the central and the eastern regions of what is to-day the State 

 of New York, established a tribal federation or league, with a care- 

 fully prepared constitution, based on peace, righteousness, justice, 

 and power. These five Iroquois tribes spoke dialects of the Iroquo- 

 ian stock of languages, which is one of about 50 spoken north of 

 Mexico. 



After more than four years of a world war, characterized by 

 such merciless slaughter of men, women, and children, by such 

 titanic mobilization of men and weapons of destruction, and by such 

 hideous brutality, that no past age of savagery has equaled them, 

 the peoples of the earth are now striving to form a league of nations 

 for the expressed purpose of abolishing the causes of war and to 

 establish a lasting peace among all men. 



So, of more than passing interest is the fact that in the sixteenth 

 century, on the North American Continent, there was formed a per- 

 manent league of five tribes of Indians for the purpose of stopping 

 for all time the shedding of human blood by violence and of estab- 

 lishing lasting peace among all known men by means of a consti- 

 tutional form of government based on peace, justice, righteousness, 

 and power, or authority. 



Its founders did not limit the scope of this confederation to the 

 five Iroquoian tribes mentioned above, but they proposed for them- 

 selves and their posterity the greater task of gradually bringing 

 under this form of government all the known tribes of men, not 

 as subject peoples but as confederates. 



The proposal to include all the tribes of men in such a league of 

 comity and peace is the more remarkable in view of the fact that 

 that was an age of fierce tribalism, whose creed was that no person 

 had any rights of life or property outside of the tribe to whose 



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