as one of themselves; and I cannot he a black fellow, for I am disgusted with their way of living.'"
Is this not enough to make one echo the language of Judge Baron Field, of Sydney, in 1822?—
"Yet deem not this man useless,
But let him pass,—a blessing on his head!
And while in that society, to which
The tide of things had led him, he appears
To breathe, and live but for himself alone,
Unblamed, uninjured, let him bear about
The good, which the benignant law of heaven
Has hung around him; and while life is his,
Still let him prompt the lib'ral colonist
To tender offices and pensive thoughts.
"Then let him pass,—a blessing on his head!
And, long as he can wander, let him breathe
The freshness of his woods.
May never we pretend to civilize.
And make him only captive!
Let him be free of mountain solitudes;
And let him, where and when he will, sit down
Beneath the trees, and with his faithful dog
Share his chance-gather'd meal; and finally.
As in the eye of Nature he has lived.
So in the eye of Nature let him die,"
MISSIONS.
The apparent hopelessness of civilization with some races strikes the most careless observer. Forty years ago, a Hobart Town writer despairingly exclaimed of the Aborigines: "Had they any affinity to the African negro we might entertain some distant hope of the possibility of civilizing them." Count Strzelecki, with all his chivalrous regard for the poor creatures, admits the work no easy one, saying: "From what has been observed of the two races, one may affirm, without dread of contradiction, that it would be easier to bring down the Whites to the level of the Blacks, than to raise the latter to the ideas and habits of our race." He presents this apology for his dark friends: "The Christianity which was offered to him was stripped of its charity, and the civilization embraced no recognition of his rights of property. He, therefore, rejected both." The Van Diemen's Land Courier, of August 1830, had a lingering hope, after all the failures, that something yet might be done;
