Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/210

 as the most efficient means of civilizing the other tribes.

But whatever course may be adopted, I sincerely hope that it may be attended with more success than has hitherto accompanied the well-meant endeavours of the government. Above all, I consider it of paramount importance, even as effecting the natives themselves, that the laws regulating their relations with Europeans, should be put upon a more equitable footing, and while I should be one of the last men to propose a system, which I thought would substantially bear harshly upon them, I at the same time equally deprecate the indulgence of a mawkish sentimentality on their behalf, at the hazard of sacrificing the lives and properties of our fellow-countrymen, who are equally entitled to the protection of the laws.

I cannot conclude this subject without touching on a point alluded to by Lord Stanley, in the last paragraph of his dispatch, the extinction of the native before the advance of the white settler—a circumstance which seems to have occurred so uniformly, and without apparent causes adequate to account for it, that it has induced some persons to attribute it to a direct intervention of Divine Power; for neither the diseases consequent on intercourse with Europeans, nor the mortality caused by collisions with them are by any means sufficient for this purpose. The aborigines of Australia, as well as those of New Zealand and the South Sea Islands, are subject to periodical attacks of epidemics which commit great ravages, but probably they were so before the arrival of Europeans amongst them. It is possible that previous