An Address, Delivered Before the Was-ah Ho-de-no-son-ne or New Confederacy of the Iroquois / Also, Genundewah, a Poem

BY HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT, A MEMBER: AT ITS THIRD ANNUAL COUNCIL, AUGUST 14, 1845.
ALSO,
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.
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.