person whomsoever,
under the authority of Her Majesty's Government, on pain of forcible
expulsion therefrom, and such consequences as might be necessarily
attendant on it, and all magistrates and other persons by them authorized
and deputed, were required to conform themselves to the directions and
instructions of this proclamation, in effecting the retirement and
expulsion of the Aborigines from the settled districts of that
territory."]
What are they to do under such circumstances, or how support a life so
bereft of its wonted supplies? Can we wonder that they should still
remain the same low abject and degraded creatures that they are,
loitering about the white man's house, and cringing, and pandering to the
lowest menial for that food they can no longer procure for themselves? or
that wandering in misery through a country, now no longer their own,
their lives should be curtailed by want, exposure, or disease? If, on the
other hand, upon the first appearance of Europeans, the natives become
alarmed, and retire from their presence, they must give up all the haunts
they had been accustomed to frequent, and must either live in a starving
condition, in the back country, ill supplied with game, and often wanting
water, or they must trespass upon the territory of another tribe, in a
district perhaps little calculated to support an additional population,
even should they be fortunate enough to escape being forced into one
belonging to an enemy.
Under any circumstances, however, they have but little respite from
inconvenience and want. The white man rapidly spreads himself over the
country, and without the power of retiring any further, they are
overtaken, and beset by all the evils from which they had previously
fled.
Such are some of the blessings held out to the savage by civilization,
and they are only some of them. The picture is neither fanciful nor
overdrawn; there is no trait in it that I have not personally witnessed,
or that might not have been enlarged upon; and there are often other
circumstances of greater injury and aggression, which, if dwelt upon,
would have cast a still darker shade upon the prospects and condition of
the native.
Enough has, however, perhaps been said to indicate the degree of injury
our presence unavoidably inflicts. I would hope, also, to point out the
justice, as well as the expediency of appropriating a considerable
portion of the money obtained, by the sales of land, towards a
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