the streets of Paramatta and Sydney naked, despite many
prohibitions and attempts to clothe them, which always
failed"

--so ingrained was the absence of shame in the native mind.

Jackman, the "Australian Captive," an Englishman who spent seventeen
months among the natives, describes them as being "as nude as Adam and
Eve" (99). "The Australians' utter lack of modesty is remarkable,"
writes F. Mueller (207):

"it reveals itself in the way in which their clothes
are worn. While an attempt is made to cover the upper,
especially the back part of the body, the private parts
are often left uncovered."

One early explorer, Sturt (II., 126), found the natives of the
interior, without exception, "in a complete state of nudity."

The still earlier Governor Philipps (1787) found that the inhabitants
of New South Wales had no idea that one part of the body ought to be
covered more than any other. Captain Flinders, who saw much of
Australia in 1795, speaks in one place (I., 66) of "the short skin
cloak which is of kangaroo, and worn over the shoulders, leaving the
rest of the body naked." This was in New South Wales. At Keppel Bay
(II., 30) he writes: "These people ... go entirely naked;" and so on
at other points of the continent touched on his voyage. In Dawson (61)
we read: "They were perfectly naked, as they always are." Nor has the
Australian in his native state changed in the century or more since
whites have known him. In the latest book on Central Australia (1899)
by Spencer and Gillen we read (17) that to this day a native woman
"with nothing on except an ancient straw hat and an old pair of boots
is perfectly happy."

IS CIVILIZATION DEMORALIZING?

The reader is now in a position to judge of the reliability of the
"fearless" Stephens as a witness, and of the blind bias of the
anthropologist who uses him as such. It surely ought not to be
necessary to prove that races among whom cannibalism, infanticide,
wife enslavement and murder, and other hideous crimes are rampant as
unreproved national customs, could not possibly be refined and moral
in their sexual relations, which offer the greatest of all temptations
to unrestrained selfishness. Yet Stephens tells us in his article that
before the advent of the whites these people were chaste, and
"conjugal infidelity was almost if not entirely unknown;" while
Westermarck (61, 64, 65) classes the Australians with those savages
"among w