mane; their hospitality is so great that they extend it to every one who is not their enemy. They speak with much judgment and reason, and, when they have any important enterprise to undertake, the chief is attentively listened to for two or three hours together, and he is answered point to point, as the subject may require.”
In 1656 the Jesuit missionaries among the Iroquois reported: “Among many faults caused by their blindness and barbarous education, we meet with virtues enough to cause shame among the most of Christians. Hospitals for the poor would be useless among them, because there are no beggars; those who have are so liberal to those who are in want, that everything is enjoyed in common. The whole village must be in distress before any individual is left in necessity.”
Captain Carver, who travelled in 1766 among the wildest tribes, describes them as “cruel, barbarous, and revengeful in war, persevering and inflexible in pursuit of an enemy, sanguinary in their treatment of prisoners, and sparing neither age nor sex.” On the other hand, he found them temperate in their mode of living, patient of hunger and fatigue, sociable and humane to all whom they looked on as friends, and ready to share with them the last morsel of food they possessed, or to expose their lives in their defence. In their public character he describes them as “possessing an attachment to their nation unknown to the inhabitants of any other country, combining as if actuated by one soul against a common enemy, never swayed in their councils by selfish or party views, but sacrificing everything to the honor and advantage of their tribe, in support of which they fear no danger, and are affected by no sufferings. They are not only affectionately attached, indeed, to their own offspring, but are extremely fond of children in general. They instruct them carefully in their own principles, and train them up with attention in the maxims and habits of their nation. Their system consists chiefly in the influence of example, and impressing on them the traditionary histories of their ancestors. When the children act wrong, their parents remonstrate and reprimand but never chastise them.”—Halkett’s Hist. Notes.
The very idea of corporal punishment of little children seems to have been peculiarly obnoxious to the native North American, In the “Relation de Nouvelle France,” published in 1633, there is a curious story of an incident which took place at Quebec. A party of Indians, watching a French drummer-boy beat his drum,
