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  AN
  ADDRESS,
  DELIVERED BEFORE THE
  WAS-AH HO-DE-NO-SON-NE
  OR
  NEW CONFEDERACY OF THE IROQUOIS,

  BY

  HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT,

  A MEMBER:
  AT ITS THIRD ANNUAL COUNCIL,
  AUGUST 14, 1845.


  ALSO,

  GENUNDEWAH,
  A POEM,

  BY

  W. H. C. HOSMER,

  A MEMBER:

  PRONOUNCED ON THE SAME OCCASION.

  PUBLISHED BY THE CONFEDERACY.

  ROCHESTER:
  PRINTED BY JEROME & BROTHER, TALMAN BLOCK,
  Sign of the American Eagle, Buffalo-Street.

  1846.




ADDRESS.


GENTLEMEN:

In a country like ours, whose institutions rest on the popular will, we
must rely for our social and literary means and honors, exclusively on
personal exertions, springing from the bosom of society. We have no
external helps and reliances, sealed in expectations of public
patronage, held by the hands of executive, or ministerial power. Our
ancestors, it is true, were accustomed to such stimulants to literary
exertions. Titles and honors were the prerogatives of Kings, who
sometimes stooped from their political eminences, to bestow the reward
upon the brows of men, who had rendered their names conspicuous in the
fields of science and letters. Such is still the hope of men of letters
in England, Germany and France. But if a bold and hardy ancestry, who
had learned the art of thought in the bitter school of experience, were
accustomed to such dispensations of royal favors, while they remained in
Europe, they feel but little benefit from them here; and made no
provision for their exercise, as one of the immunities of powers, when
they came to set up the frame of a government for themselves.

No ruler, under our system, is invested with authority to tap, his
kneeling fellow subject on the crown of his head, and exclaim, "Arise,
Sir, Knight!" The cast of our institutions is all the other way, and the
tendency of things, as the public mind becomes settled and compacted,
is, to take away from men the prestige of names and titles; to award but
little, on the score of antiquarian merit, and to weigh every man's
powers and abilities, political and literary, in the scale of absolute
individual capacity, to be judged of, by the community at large. If
there are to be any "orders," in America, let us hope they will be like
that, whose institution we are met to celebrate, which is founded on the
principle of intellectual emulation, in the fields of history, science
and letters.

Such are, indeed, the objects which bring us together on the present
occasion, favored as we are in assembling around the light of this
emblematic COUNCIL FIRE. Honored by your notice, as an honorary member,
in your young institution, I may speak of it, as if I were myself a
fellow laborer, in your circle: and, at least, as one, understanding
somewhat of its plan, who feels a deep interest in its success.

Adopting one of the seats of the aboriginal powers, which once cast the
spell of its simple, yet complicated, government, over the territory, a
central point has been established HERE. To this central point,
symbolizing the whole scheme of the Iroquois system, other points of
subcentralization tend, as so many converging lines. You come from the
east and the west, the north and the south. You have obeyed ONE
impulse--followed ONE principle--come to unite your energies in ONE
object. That object is the cultivation of letters. To give it force and
distinctness, by which it may be known and distinguished among the
efforts made to improve and employ the leisure hours of the young men of
Western New York, you have adopted a name derived from the ancient
confederacy of the Iroquois, who once occupied this soil. With the name,
you have taken the general system of organization of society, within a
society, held together by one bond. That bond, as existing in the
TOTEMIC tie, reaches, with a peculiar force, each individual, in such
society. It is an idea noble in itself, and worthy of the thought and
care, by which it has been nurtured and moulded into its present
auspicious form.--The union you thus form, is a union of minds. It is a
band of brotherhood, but a brotherhood of letters. It is a confederacy
of tribes, but a literary conf