famines proceeding from the cruelty or ignorance of society,—and all wars coming from the passions of men,—were esteemed "appointments of Divine Providence." Professor Waitz properly rebukes this impiety, or self-delusive blindness, in this manner: "According to the teaching of the American school, the higher races are destined to displace the lower. The extinction of the lower is predestined by Nature; and it would thus appear that we must not merely acknowledge the right of the white American to destroy the Red man, but perhaps praise him that he has constituted himself the instrument of Providence in carrying out and promoting this law of destruction."
Not a few put away the paltry religious pretence, and take up the broad doctrine of necessity. Mr. Squier, the distinguished American traveller and ethnologist, asserts, in his "Central America," that "short-sighted philanthropy may lament, and sympathy drop a tear, as it looks forward to the total disappearance of the lower forms of humanity, but the laws of nature are irreversible—it is the will of God." But Captain Burton, the enterprising explorer, takes up this bold ground: "Maugre some evidence to the contrary, I still believe that the North American Aborigine, like the Tasmanian and the Australian, is but a temporary denizen of the world, who falls in the first struggle with nature. He is like a wild animal, to be broken, but not to be tamed, as the wolf can be taught to refrain from worrying, but cannot be made to act as a dog. In his wild state, the Indian falls before the white man. Settled and civilized, he dies of acute disease."
That is, the Blacks go before the superior Caucasian race, as the old, gigantic Saurians before other types of beings, and we have but to shrug our shoulders, and cry, "Poor fellows!" As the Irish elk retired before the Celt, the reindeer before the hunters of Gaul, so the Tasmanian before the Saxon. But while the Native thus retires, the kangaroo does not, the opossum does not. These very ancient animals suffer no diminution, but are greater pests to the settlers than ever the Blacks were, destroying crops or monopolizing the choicest pastures. Battues of thousands fail sensibly to thin the kangaroo army. The Native dog, or dingo, is nearly poisoned off, and the emu is hunted from the plains; but the fleet kangaroo conceals himself in the scrub by day to feed on the squatter's grass by night, as if he
