Page:The State and Position of Western Australia.djvu/41

 of the heathen in general, passes by or neglects a country on whose shores it has planted a colony for its own convenience and advantage. To the religious part of such a nation, at all events, the appeal seems one that has only to be made, to be immediately successful.

But if these remarks necessarily apply to Western Australia, considered apart from the continent to which it belongs,—if they cannot be gainsaid or resisted when the case is thus limited—with what accumulated force do they apply when we look at the connexion which all the while subsists between this settlement and that great continent, a country equal in extent to Europe; the eastern shores of which have not only sustained all the common and inseparable injuries attendant upon colonization conducted under ordinary circumstances, but have had superinduced all the evils of a penal settlement! Not only has Australia, in that quarter, experienced none of those compensating results which every right-minded and considerate person must in all instances desire; but, on the contrary, evils which are of rare occurrence in colonization—evils the most afflicting and appalling, have been—thoughtlessly, it is hoped, but on an extensive scale, inflicted.

It is now about half a century since a penal settlement was formed on that coast. To those shores a moral pestilence has since been wafted. The scum and refuse of the civilized nation (men whose education in their own country has only served to render them adepts in villainy) have been let loose upon the natives—for it seems an almost inevitable result of a penal settlement, that some of the most desperate and depraved of the convicts will, from time to time, escape, and lead on the native tribes to the commission of every enormity that malignant ingenuity can devise. Such has been the case in New South Wales, and in Van Diemen’s Land.