esence; and even the populous districts,
and establishments of considerable force, were not safe from their
depredations.

At the time when they first became formidable, armed bushrangers scoured
the colony; sometimes the allies of the natives, much oftener their
oppressors.[8] Outlaws themselves, they inculcated the arts of violence.
The improved caution and cunning of the natives, so often noticed by the
government, were ascribed, in no small degree, to the treacherous
lessons of degraded Europeans. But when the bushranger did not employ
these people as the instrument of his designs, by fear or cruelty, often
he destroyed them: thus Lemon and Brown set up the natives as marks to
fire at. The irritated savage confounded the armed, though unoffending
stock-keeper, with his marauding countrymen, and missing the object of
his premeditated vengeance, speared the first substitute he encountered.
This conclusion is amply supported by facts. The common principles which
affect the minds of nations towards each other; the reprisals, which are
vindicated in civilised war, only differ in circumstance. A thousand
injuries, never recorded, if stated in a connexion with these results,
would enable us to see how often the harmless settler was sacrificed to
passions, provoked by his robber countrymen.

In 1826, a remarkable instance was brought under the notice of
government. Dunne, who at length met the punishment he deserved, seized
a woman, and forced her to the hut of Mr. Thompson, on the Shannon,
where he detained her with violence; she, however, escaped to her
people, and roused them to avenge her. Dunne, next morning, suddenly
found himself in their midst: his musket protected him, and after hours
of such torture as his conscience and fears might inflict, he managed to
get off. On the following day, the woman led her tribe, vociferating
threats, to the hut in which she had been maltreated, where they
massacred James Scott, a man with whom they had lived in friendship for
many years, and who, when warned a few days before to be on his guard,
smiled at the notion of danger.

The treatment of some of these women was such, as no one can be expected
to credit, until prepared by extensive acquaintance with human
depravation. A monster boasted that, having captured a native woman,
whose husband he had killed, he strung the bleeding head to her neck,
and drove her before him as his prize. Had not this fact been guaranteed
by formal