Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/493

 begging for clothing and rum. From the diseases introduced among them, the tribes in immediate connexion with those large towns almost became extinct; not more than two or three remained, when I was last in New South Wales, of tribes which formerly consisted of 200 or 300."

Dr. Lang, the minister of the Scotch church, writes, "From the prevalence of infanticide, from intemperance, and from European diseases, their number is evidently and rapidly diminishing in all the older settlements of the colony, and in the neighbourhood of Sidney especially, they present merely the shadow of what were once numerous tribes." Yet even now "he thinks their number within the limits of the colony of New South Wales cannot be less than 10,000—an indication of what must once have been the population, and what the destruction. It is only," Dr. Lang observes, "through the influence of Christianity, brought to bear upon the natives by the zealous exertions of devoted missionaries, that the progress of extinction can be checked."

Enormous as are these evils, it would be well if they stopped here; but the moral corruption of our penal colonies overflows, and is blown by the winds, like the miasma of the plague, to other shores, and threatens with destruction one of the fairest scenes of human regeneration and human happiness to which we can turn on this huge globe of cruelty for hope and consolation. Where is the mind that has not dwelt in its young enthusiasm on the summer beauty of the Islands of the Pacific? That has not, from the day that Captain Cook first fell in with them, wandered in imagination with our voyagers and mission-