Caesar, for whose ill reception by their forefathers modern Britons are not in the habit of expressing much remorse.
The sort of punishment which, even 1200 years after the Roman invasion, would have been legally inflicted upon anyone who had dared to drive off or kill the deer and fill the royal or baronial chases with sheep and horses, or to plough up large portions of the land, may be inferred from the spirit of our ancient forest statutes; and the revenge taken by the natives of Australia upon those who seemed to them to be guilty of similar infractions of the laws and customs of their country, has certainly been far less severe than was the judicial severity of our Norman and Saxon ancestors.
In the case, too, of the poor Australian, it was not only his land and the wild animals upon it of which he feared to be deprived by the entrance of the white man: the symbol of submission, that was offered in old times by a weak nation to its stronger neighbour, included water as well as earth, and there can be no doubt that the jealous feeling of proprietorship with which each different tribe guarded its scanty supplies of water helped much to strengthen the opposition towards the interlopers.
In respect to water, however, even the natives themselves are ready to acknowledge that some amends has been made by their conquerors, since the cutting down of the trees, which had for ages absorbed the moisture in the soil, causes the water, which is not now required for the nourishment of those great masses of vegetation, first to accumulate in the earth, and then to break forth as a spring. The same deficiency of rain that, in the dry winter of which I have been speaking, brought us rare birds
