have defended her" he said, "but then the lot would have only been shifted to some other yet more unprotected child, for we were all dying of hunger, and eat we must."
The practice also, which Father Salvado found in vogue in native families, of killing the third daughter at her birth had its origin, no doubt, in the scarcity of the means of subsistence, since in no other manner can such cruelty be accounted for, amongst a people so fond of their children as the West Australian natives. Neither had custom entirely robbed the deed of its horrors, although the murder was always perpetrated by the mother herself. So strangely did philanthropy and barbarity run hand in hand that, if other women were present at the birth, it not unfrequently happened that one of them, rather than consent to the infanticide, would herself adopt the child and bring it up; and Father Salvado says that he was personally acquainted with more than one of these good foster-mothers and the nurslings whose lives they had saved.
The monks judged that the first remedy to be applied to the evils of murder and cannibalism was the tilling of the ground, and they accordingly waited on their bishop, imploring him to build and found a monastery, around which might be gathered a native population which the Fathers would undertake to instruct personally in field labour. "The object that we had at heart," continues our author, "was the establishing of a village of native proprietors, who should be husbandmen and artisans as well as real Christians."
This was a scheme to which it was easier to obtain the bishop's consent than to discover how the necessary funds
