white race have begun their deadly work. As a rule to
which there are no exceptions, if a tribe of blacks is
found away from the white settlement, the more vicious
of the white men are most anxious to make the
acquaintance of the natives, and that, too, solely for
purposes of immorality. ... I saw the natives and was
much with them before those dreadful immoralities were
well known ... and I say it fearlessly, that nearly all
their evils they owed to the white man's immorality and
to the white man's drink."

Now the first question a conscientious truth-seeker feels inclined to
ask regarding this "fearless" Stephens who thus boldly accuses of
ignorance all those who hold that the Australian race was degraded
before it came in contact with whites, is, "Who is he and what are his
qualifications for serving as a witness in this matter?" He is, or
was, a simple-minded settler, kindly no doubt, who for some
inscrutable reason was allowed to contribute a paper to the _Journal
of the Royal Society of New South Wales_ (Vol. XXXIII.). His
qualifications for appearing as an expert in Australian anthropology
may be inferred from various remarks in his paper. He naively tells a
story about a native who killed an opossum, and after eating the meat,
threw the intestines to his wife. "Ten years before that," he adds,
"that same man would have treated his wife as himself." Yet we have
just seen that all the explorers, in all parts of the country, found
that the natives who had never seen a white man treated their women
like slaves and dogs.

ABORIGINAL HORRORS

If the savage learned his wantonness from the whites, did he get all
his other vicious habits from the same source? We know on the best
authorities that the disgusting practice of cannibalism prevailed
extensively among the natives. "They eat the young men when they die,
and the young women if they are fat" (Curr, III., 147). Lumholtz
entitled his book on Australia _Among Cannibals_. The Rev. G. Taplin
says (XV.):

"Among the Dieyerie tribe cannibalism is the universal
practice, and all who die are indiscriminately devoured
... the mother eats the flesh of her children, and the
children that of their mother," etc.

"If a man had a fat wife," says the same writer (2), "he was always
particularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might be
seized by prowling cannibals." Among the wilder tri