64 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
inferiors and made “beasts of burden,” the Iroquois are not to be ranked 
with them. Among them women are held in high esteem, so much so, 
indeed, that on the death of a chief the women of his family are left to 
select among his kindred the person whom they deem best qualified to 
succeed him; and the person whom they choose is rarely rejected by the 
Council. In the next line the singer invokes the laws which their fore- 
fathers established, and he concludes by calling upon his hearers to listen 
to the wisdom of their forefathers, whom he invokes as if present. Asa 
whole, the hymn may be described as an expression of love of peace, of 
reverence for the laws and for the dead, and of sympathy with the 
living. Such is the “National Anthem ”—the ‘ Marseillaise ”’—of the 
terrible [roquois. 
The lines of the translated hymn have been cast into the metre of 
Longfellow’s “ Hiawatha.” The version in these lines, however inade- 
quate, will give a better idea of the true force of the original than a 
bald literal translation. We are to imagine, in the singing, that each 
line is twice repeated, and is followed by many ejaculations of Haih- 
hath ! ‘* All hail !” 
‘ To the Great Peace bring we greeting ! 
To the dead Chiefs kindred, greeting! 
To the strong men round him, greeting! 
To the mourning women, greeting ! 
These our grandsires’ words repeating, 
Graciously, O Grandsires, hear us!” 
It may well be understood that these condensed expressions of feel- 
ing, striking such varied chords of emotion, and uttered amid impressive 
surroundings, such as may be inferred from the foregoing narrative, 
must in former times have produced an extraordinarily powerful effect— 
as even at the present day, under widely different circumstances, they 
retain an influence of singular force and persistence. The whole detail 
of the Condoling Council indicates a frame of polity constructed with 
consummate skill to include all the methods which experience and reflec- 
tion had led the founder (and also, as Morgan has suggested, some of his 
successors, improving on his plans) to deem most effective in establish- 
ing and strengthening a state. These were, first, a legislature, or gen- 
eral council, comprising two distinct elements—the one a conservative 
aristocracy, hereditary in certain families, and constantly renewed and 
kept vigorous by the clear insight of female suffrage ; the other a 
selected class of non-hereditary councillors, holding both advisory and 
executive powers,—and the whole system so conditioned as to preserve 
to the people the utmost democratic freedom and personal equality of 
rights before the law ; and, secondly, institutions of local self-rule, jeal- 
ously maintained in the several tribes, but combined in a strict federal 
alliance, and this alliance so devised as not merely to allow but openly 
