Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/181

 The proposition to be discussed is this: Whether the fact of a small population of savages, wandering over an immense tract of country in pursuit of game, or for the purpose of procuring subsistence in some such way, gives them such an indefeasible right to that territory, that no other nation has a right to trench upon its boundaries. This is I think stating the question fairly; for if you encroach never so little, for the purpose of introducing agricultural or pastoral pursuits, the tendency is to diminish pro tanto the means of subsistence of the savage. It is also against all experience to suppose that the occupation of a savage country by civilized man can take place without injury to its aboriginal inhabitants. The conflict of right therefore begins the moment that the white man sets his foot upon its shore, and the question comes to this: which has the better right—the savage, born in a country, which he runs over, but can be scarcely said to occupy, the representive [sic] of a race, which for ages have left unimproved the splendid domains spread out before them, as if to tempt their industry, but of which they may be deemed to have refused the possession; or, the civilized man, who comes to introduce into this unimproved and, hitherto, unproductive country, the industry which supports life, and the arts which adorn it, who will render it capable of maintaining millions of human beings more nearly in that position, which it was intended that man should hold in the scale of creation? I conceive that the original right, whatever it may have been, which the savage possessed, that right, by his laches, he has forfeited. The commission to "go forth and replenish