CHAPTER III. THE IROQUOIS GENS.

The power of these natural and spontaneous communities had to be broken, and it was. But it was done by influences that from the very beginning bear the mark of degradation, of a downfall from the simple moral grandeur of the old gentile society. The new system of classes is inaugurated by the meanest impulses: vulgar covetousness, brutal lust, sordid avarice, selfish robbery of common wealth. The old gentile society without classes is undermined and brought to fall by the most contemptible means: theft, violence, cunning, treason. And during all the thousands of years of its existence, the new society has never been anything else but the development of the small minority at the expense of the exploited and oppressed majority. More than ever this is true at present.