Page:A lecture on the evils of emigration and transportation.djvu/27

23 uncivilized, females, I cannot but condemn the whole system. But I have been told by a genuine supporter of Missionaries to look at the pleasing accounts published in the Monthly and Quarterly Reports;—I have done so, and find very flattering statements; but there ought to be published with these accounts, and it ought to be placed in what is termed juxta-position, an account how the Missionaries were received in a friendly manner, how the Missionaries found them without spiritous liquors, but that they introduced them with the word of God, and that they themselves have infuriated their passions with the maddening poison. But if some may have been more cautious than the rest, let them state how the men employed about their premises have made fathers and mothers drunk, whilst they have violated their innocent daughters, and that the cries of their injured children have aroused them from a state of stupefaction, and then, in endeavouring to obtain possession of their daughters, how they have been fired upon by the wretches who profess to believe in a just and omnipotent God. How the natives of those Islands have been driven from the land that had hitherto afforded them subsistence, and which they considered as their own, and their children's inheritance, to make room for the new comers,—how this and the other circumstances I have named has engendered a spirit of retaliation, and then let the Missionaries state how they, the savages, as the Missionaries are pleased to call them, have been hunted like beasts of prey, and murdered by hundreds of those cruel invaders of the soil, and how, in some instances, whole nations have been exterminated off the face of the earth. Let them publish the above, and then, if you find that the good effected by them is greater than the evils, give them, if you are disposed, your support; but until then refrain from being a supporter of bloodshed, carnage, and violation, under the name of Christianity. I will conclude at present the subject by reading some beautiful and very applicable lines, composed by your talented townsman, James Montgomery, on the commencement of Missionaries:—

"In placid indolence supinely blest, A feeble race these beauteous isles possess'd; Untamed, untaught, in arms and arts unskill'd, Their patrimonial soil they rudely till'd, Chased the free rovers of the savage wood; Ensnared the wild-bird, wept the scaly flood,