Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/52

44

history of the old races of mankind furnishes many examples of the decay of nations, but few, if any, where annihilation has followed the declension of their independence, and their emmergence into barbarity. With the subsidence of their power, and loss of national status, they have not necessarily passed away from the earth, but are still represented among its people, though it may be that their descendants are unknown to us by the names that distinguished their ancestors. The many great Communities mentioned in the Old Testament as then existing—the Idumean, Chaldean, Assyrian, and others—though long since politically extinct, have not died off, but are still perpetuated, though not as distinct nations.

The contact of the superior families of mankind with one another, even where it takes the form of collision, does not necessarily imply the extermination of either, and if it has ever occurred at all, it has not been with the frequency with which it has been observed, where civilisation has been opposed to pure barbarism, as in the New World, in Australasia, and Polynesia, where the existence of the primitive man seems incompatible with that of a superior race, as if the approach of the latter carried with it a decree for the retreat and extirpation of the other, though that extinction has always appeared to me, (at least in the case of the Tasmanian savage,) to be traceable to very different causes from those it is usual to ascribe to it, such as the pretended dissemination of European vices and practices among them, to which by far the larger number were never exposed, and to cruelties that were never directed against them in anything like the degree which some inconsiderate writers have too rashly affirmed.

It is not, however, the object of this chapter to repeat what I have said elsewhere, of the real causes that have led to the total eradication of the aboriginal men of Tasmania, but only to collect together before the opportunity is wholly lost, a few of the vestiges that are still unforgotten of a people whose generations have passed away, whose days, as the inspired psalmist says, are gone, and whose years are brought to au end, "as it were a tale that is told."