Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/184

 that they are dealing with a state of society not analogous to any thing within the range of their former experience—to frame such a code of laws as may at once afford protection to the native, and security to the settler. And it should never he forgotten, that it is, in practice, impossible to succeed in accomplishing the one, without making provision for the other. To hold the balance even between the two, is, however, by no means an easy task; and our rulers have eluded the difficulty: "Declare them," say they, "in the fullest sense of the words, British subjects; give them the rights of British citizens, and the protection of British law." But, before doing this, they should have reflected, that the laws which are well suited to a civilized people, living in fixed abodes, may be totally inapplicable to hordes of wandering savages; nor is the matter mended, but rather the contrary, by the circumstance, that the range of their wanderings is amongst the dwellings of a civilized but scattered community, whose laws and language they are ignorant of, and whose lives and properties are, in a great measure at their mercy. They should have remembered too, that subject and sovereign are correlative terms; that protection and submission are reciprocal duties; that a declaration of this kind, instead of good citizens, may create a parcel of insubordinate rebels. And they should have considered what were their means of carrying the law into effect, in case their new subjects did not consider themselves bound by it. To give men the protection of laws, which they do not acknowledge, and the sanctions of which it is impossible to enforce, is a one-sided arrangement, which is likely to press