Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/196

 laws, and not to act on abstract notions of right or wrong.

This is not written for the purpose of injuring that officer, who has, I have no doubt, been led into the commission of legal crime by an over anxiety to do substantial justice; for there is no doubt (if the above account be correct ) that, in the eyes of the law, the shooting of all those men (except the first) was murder. And further, there is equally little doubt that, if the law had been properly observed, the natives engaged in the crimes which I have enumerated would have escaped with perfect impunity, either by getting clear away in the first instance, or by being afterwards declared incompetent to be put upon their trial.

I will now cite another case, which, though putting the matter in a different point of view, shows equally the inapplicability of the English laws in their unmodified form. Some time in 1843 a native was brought up before a magistrate, by one of the assistant protectors, for using threatening language towards him; and that magistrate was bound, by the words of his commission, to commit him to jail until he could find security to keep the peace; where (if the law be strictly adminis-