276 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
ing the social, the defensive, and the communal principles, we can under- 
stand how they could have been created, and so elaborately and laboriously 
finished. It is evident that they were the work of the people, constructed 
for their own enjoyment and protection. Enforced labor never created 
them On the contrary, it is the charm of all these edifices, roomy, and 
tasteful and remarkable as they are, that they were raised by the Indians 
for their own use, with willing hands, and occupied by them on terms of 
entire equality. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are emphatically the 
three great principles of the gens, and this architecture responds to these 
sentiments. And it is highly creditable to the Indian mind that while in 
the Middle Status of barbarism they had developed the capacity to plan, 
and the industry to rear, structures of such architectural design and impos- 
ing magnitude. 
I have now submitted all I intended to present with respect to the 
house architecture of the American aborigines. It covers but a small part 
of a great subject. As a key to the interpretation of this architecture, two 
principles, the practice of hospitality and the practice of communism in 
living, have been employed. They seem to afford a satisfactory explana- 
tion of its peculiar features in entire harmony with Indian institutions. 
Should the general reader be able to acquiesce im this interpretation, it 
will lead to a reconstruction of our aboriginal history, now so imperatively 
demanded. 
