punish murder," would, if another person was killed by the natives, commit a wholesale murder, and drive the natives out of one other portion of their country. Lord Glenelg, however, observed that it would be necessary that inquiry should be made whether some act of harshness or injustice had not originally provoked the enmity of the natives, before such massacres could be justified. His language is not only just, but very descriptive of the cause of these attacks from the natives.
"It is impossible to regard such conflicts without regret and anxiety, when we recollect how fatal, in too many instances, our colonial settlements have proved to the natives of the places where they have been formed; and this too by a series of conflicts in every one of which it has been asserted, and apparently with justice, that the immediate aggression has not been on our side. The real causes of these hostilities are to be found in a course of petty encroachments and acts of injustice committed by the new settlers, at first submitted to by the natives, and not sufficiently checked in the outset by the leaders of the colonists. Hence has been generated in the minds of the injured party a deadly spirit of hatred and vengeance, which breaks out at length into deeds of atrocity, which, in their turn, make retaliation a necessary part of self-defence."[1]
It is some satisfaction that the recent inquiries have led to the appointment of a protector of the Aborigines, but who shall protect them from the multitudinous evils which beset them on all sides from their intercourse with the whites—men expelled by the laws from their own country for their profligacy, or men corrupted
- ↑ Despatch to Sir James Stirling, 23d July, 1835.
