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Rh our brothers, the English, to withdraw, for I will keep you both at arms' length."

Count Strzelecki has pointed out the consequences to the poor Native of this disregard of their rights to the soil. "Since the time," he says, "that the Aborigines have been declared by law, or rather, sophistry of law, to be illegitimate possessors of any land which they do not cultivate, the Australian has been looked upon, ipso facto, as a sort of brute intruder, and, in the transactions which ended in the taking possession of New Holland by the English, has been allowed no more voice than the kangaroo."

This is a truth of which colonization furnishes us with many examples. When, notwithstanding the fact of the tribes having specific boundaries to their respective grounds, and across which it were trespass to pass, we see their land privileges wholly ignored, it can excite no surprise that their personal rights should receive little respect. And, in spite of the exhortations of Secretaries of State, and the Proclamations of Governors, to treat Aborigines as equal with the Whites in the sight of the law, it is notorious that their claims have been rarely admitted, and still more seldom acted upon. If poverty alone be held a sufficient plea in England for subjecting a man to the virtual deprivation of civic rights, and the rejection of his share in the government of his country, it follows with more force that the landless Native would, while acknowledged a British subject, be denied the franchise. Even universal suffrage in a colony could never reach his position. But he is not permitted the exercise of that common right of another British subjects—trial by his peers. Worse still, he is made amenable to laws of which he is totally ignorant, and the correction of which is beyond his power, while the customs of his own people are utterly dishonoured in the eyes of his foreign rulers. To complete his sense of degradation, he discovers that his Testimony against a White, a fellow-subject, is absolutely valueless; and that no amount of counter Native evidence can shake the stability of the unsupported word of one European against him.

The Peruvian Government of the Spaniards humanely treated the Indians as minors, and protected them by special laws as such. "But," says the traveller Mr. Markham, "the opposite plan, which has been adopted in some of the English colonies,