Let U8 pause for u. moiiieiit and conaider. Miago w1i en he was landed hatl amongst the white people none who would he troly friends of his ; thuy would give him acraps from their table* bnt the very outcasts of tlie whitoa would not have treated him aa an equal ; they had no sympathy with him ; he could not have married a white woman, he hiul no eertaiii meaua of subsistence open to Jiim, he never could have heen either a husband or a father if he had lived apart from hia own people. Wheif aniougst the whites was he to tiud one who woT.dd liave tilled for him the place of his black mother, whom he is much attached to? WJiat white man mo a Id have been hiu brother? What white woman hia eieter ? He had two courses open to him : he could either have renounced all natural ties and have led a hopeless, joyless Ufe amongst the whites, ever u servant, ever an inferior being; or he could renounce civilization and return to the frieuds of hia childhood and to the hahita of his youth. He choee the latter coni'se, and 1 think that I should have done the aame,"*" The absolute suhmiasiou of the individual to the will of the trihe left Miago no other caurse. But those who inipnted to him inborn, iiiitameal)le savagery have been eonfated by the result in every case in which the black child has by accident been taken from the tribe before il had been able to learn the language and traditions of the people. An infant whose ])arent3 were shot at Toongabbe in the last century, another who was permitted at the Hunter Eiver to l>e suckled by a white woman vt^iose child had died, and who when the foster-child grew would not part with it to its mother; these and many similar instances proved that it was the hold of native language and tradition which was too powerful to lie broken. The two instances cited were accompanied by a feeling of repugnance to being deemed members of the race which was daily, by ravages of drink and disease, undergoing degradation before the eyes of the changelings. Mr. Eyre says —
- 'The character of the Auetridinn natives is frank, open, and confitling.
In a slmrt intercourse ihey are easily made friends, and when such teriofe are once estahliahed, they associalQ with atraugura with a freedom aud fearlesaneaa tluit would give little countcnauce to the impression ao 4 '^ On the east a native (who had i>een scot to scliool and had carried off prices amongst white boys) when ho returned to the hush entered thi- corps of native Police, and sadly said to his counuanding officer (as tjuoted by the good missionary Rid ley J, **Iwish I hud never iK^eu taken out of the bu8h and educated as I have beeiit for I ciinuot he a white man ; they tr/JJ never look upon me as oue of themselves; and I cannot be a black fellow, for 1 am disgusted with their mode of livin(^."
