Page:The State and Position of Western Australia.djvu/120

 mere feeling of insecurity has this tendency; and the result of such a state of things would be the gradual extermination of the natives, while the sanguinary and lawless spirit engendered and encouraged, would re-act, and be productive of frightful consequences to the settlers themselves, continuing to pervade the community long after the aborigines had ceased to be objects of terror.

The writer has ventured thus freely, and at greater length than he had intended, to express his opinion, from the deep conviction he entertains that a serious error in colonial policy is about to be committed, which may still be corrected before any mischievous consecpiences ensue. The following is an extract from Colonel Napier’s review of the letter he received in reply to his demand for money and troops, from the South Australian Commissioners, and which letter bears date May 22, 1835:— Paragraph 4. “‘The most flourishing British colonies in North America were founded without pecuniary aid from the mother-country, and without the aid of military force, though planted in the immediate neighbourhood of warlike Indian nations.’”—See the Commissioners’ Letter. On this sentence the Colonel makes the following “Observation:”—“I have only to refer to any history of the British colonies in North America, to contradict the assertion contained in this paragraph. By such reference the Commissioners will see that, for many years, these infant colonies struggled with the greatest hardships, and that some were entirely destroyed! When Pennsylvania, which suffered the least, was granted to Penn in 1682, the country had been previously occupied for above fifty years: it had numerous settlers, and was not a desert. Besides, he went with Quakers. If all the colonists going to Australia were Quakers, and that I was William Penn, neither would I ask for troops! But what was the consequence of the peaceful government established by that great man? It was this, that in 1764 a body of Presbyterians chose, in their zeal against ‘the heathen,’ to massacre a whole tribe of harmless Indians; and ‘the weakness of the Government,’ says Robert Proud, the historian, of Pennsylvania, ‘was not able to punish these murderers, nor to chastise the insurgents.’ For my own part, I have no ambition to be at the head of such a milk-and-water colonial government, and, while fancying myself a governor, discover that I was only a football! But we find the great Penn himself complaining that it was ‘controversy, not government,’ in Pennsylvania. Let us then put Penn and his Quakers out of our heads. “All other settlements were retarded in their progress by wars. The want of regular soldiers obliged the settlers to arm, instead of attending to their peaceful avocations. Dr. Trumbull, in his History of Connecticut, says, In the