“not the least singular feature of the transaction was the entire ignorance in which the parties remained of the pending negotiations; the first intimation they received being the announcement of their marriage without, perhaps, ever having known or seen each other.  Remonstrance or objections on their part was never attempted; they received each other as the gift of their parents.”

There was no visiting or courting, little or no conversation between the unmarried, no attempts were made to please each other, and the man regarded the woman as his inferior and servant.  The result of such a state of affairs is summed up by Morgan in this memorable passage: 

“From the nature of the marriage institution among the Iroquois it follows that the passion of love was entirely unknown among them.  Affections after marriage would naturally spring up between the parties from association, from habit, and from mutual dependence; but of that marvellous passion which originates in a higher development of the passions of the human heart and is founded upon the cultivation of the affections between the sexes they were entirely ignorant.  In their temperaments they were below this passion in its simplest forms.  Attachments between individuals, or the cultivation of each other’s affections before marriage, was entirely unknown; so also were promises of marriage.”

Morgan regrets that his remarks “may perhaps divest the mind of some pleasing impressions” created by novelists and poets concerning the attachments which spring up in the bosom of Indian society; but these, he adds, are “entirely inconsistent with the marriage institution as it existed among them, and with the facts of their social history.”  I may add that another careful observer who had lived among the Indians, Parkman, cites Morgan’s remarks as to their incapacity for love with approval.

There is one more important conclusion to be drawn from Morgan’s evidence.  The Iroquois were among the most advanced of all Indians.  “In intelligence,” says Brinton (A.R., 82), “their position must be placed among the highest.”  As early as the middle of the fifteenth century the great chief Hiawatha completed the famous political league of the Iroquois.  The women, though regarded as inferiors, had more power and authority than among most other Indians.  Morgan speaks of the “unparallelled generosity” of the Iroquois, of their love of truth, their strict adherence to the faith of treaties, their ignorance of theft, their severe punishment for the infrequent crimes and offences that occurred among them.  The account he gives of their various festivals, their eloquence, their devout religious feeling and gratitude to the Great Spirit for favors received, the thanks addressed to the earth, the rivers, the useful herbs, the moving wind which banishes disease, the sun, moon, and stars for the light they give, shows them to be far superior to most of the red men.  And yet they were “below the passion of love in its simplest forms.”  Thus we see once more that refinement of sexual feeling, far from being, as the sentimentalists would have us believe, shared with us by the lowest savages, is in reality one of the latest products of civilization—­if not the very latest.