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England has been aroused from her lethargy; she awoke as a giant refreshed with wine; she has acknowledged her supineness, and confessed her guilt before God. May her future works towards the Aborigines of her Colonies praise her when she speaks with her enemies in the gate.
Retaliation on the part of the Aborigines must be expected, and consequently guarded against. The slaughter of their hundreds of fellow countrymen, the inhuman massacre of their relatives, their wives and children, cannot but fill the minds of human beings with desire to revenge their loss; and the strongest proof of their being but mere brutes, the which some assert, would consist in their resting contentedly under their deprivations and sufferings, without an attempt to take vengeance.
The spirit with which the subject of the Aborigines has been publicly agitated. by a portion of the Colonial Press. and the indecorous language which has been used in the declamation. may tend to mislead the judgement of the inconsiderate, and encourage the guilty to persist in their crimes; but, divested of all such party feeling, the question of the Aborigines resolves itself into one of a very simple nature. --We are a Christian nation, commanded to "love thy neighbour as thyself;" and directed that "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." And until these precepts be recognised as the governing principle of our laws, and acted upon by nations, churches, families, and individuals, there will be "envying, strife. confusion, and every evil work." As a Nation we have placed ourselves in a position that has compelled the Aborigines to become our neighbours, and we have worked ill towards our neighbours, because we, the many, dispossess the few Blacks of thir rights of birth, which convey to them a certain district, in which they seek and obtain their means of subsistence. Our might deprives them of this right, without remuneration: and Immigration, so beneficial to us as a Colony, in increasing our population , decreases in an incalculable ratio, our neighbours as people, by taking away the common hereditary privileges which they have possessed from time immemorial. The place of their burth is sold to the highest bidder; but the Aborigines are not included in the purchase; this would be slavery! They are excluded from the soil, being found generally prejudical to the pecuniary interests of the purchaser, and that exclusion works their death!
If sophistry and worldly philosophy could but succeed in the persuasion, that the Black inhabitants of the Colonies are merely Brutes, without reasoning faculties, and incapable of instruction, the natural consequence would be that to shoot them dead would be no more a moral evil, than the destroying of rats by poison, or of the Ourang Outang by the fusee!
The fallacies of the present day respecting the Aborigines are necessary to notice, in order to arrive at a sound conclusion respecting our treatment toward them. It has been affirmed that the Blacks are "the harmless sons of nature," consequently innocent, which, if followed out, leads to the conclusion, that they require not the Gospel of Christ to reform their hearts, and transform them into children of light; whereas, they are, as described in the Gospel, "All gone out of the way." "Their feet swift to shed blood, destruction and misery are in their ways, " and their "Places are full of the habitations of cruelty," both one towards another, until they are nearly extinct, and to others also, when the power is in their hand, and inclination excites them. Nor can these Barbarians long exist as a people, unless that Gospel which is sent to perishing sinners, that they may become saints in Christ Jesus, can be fairly and fully presented to them. A difficulty of considerable magnitude, yet to be surmounted: Nevertheless, "The whole need not a Physician, but they that are sick." At present they are warlike in their habits according to the rude means they possess. They no doubt consider us as a powerful, hostile, encroaching people, and many an innocent person will yet suffer for the alleged public aggressions on either side.
It is asserted that the sites of Missionary Stations have been ineligible, owing to their contiguity to towns and civilized society, which accounts for the hitherto apparent want of success amongst the Aborigines: but the Gospel of Christ authorises no such conclusion; otherwise nunneries for their women. and monasteries for their men would have been divinely commanded to seclude from a sinful world the followers of the Lamb -- "Go" says the Divine Legislature of the new Covenant, "into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." -- I pray not, says the only Mediator, "that thou shouldst take them out of the world. but that thou shouldest keep them from evil." -- And the Apostle of the Gentiles commands that "We should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present evil world," that though we are not to keep company with fornicators, yet not altogether with fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or with the covetous, or with extortioners, or with idolators, for then must ye needs go out of the world. It is a perfect fallacy unsupported by christian authority to suppose that intercourse with the civilized world, however irreligious is a cause of the want of success. The want of subjects is rather one cause in this Colony, it is difficult to ascertain their numbers; such exaggerated accounts of the Aborigines being from various motives so generally given. Besides which there has lacked opportunity of making known the Gospel, but to a very few of those with whom communication could be obtained.
At this Lake when the Mission was first established, the numbers were exceedingly overrated, and were considered much larger than experience justified. The hundreds of the Blacks were soon found to diminish into tens, and the many thousands which were often reported as coming down from the mountains to destroy us, and which caused many an anxious watchful night,