Page:Australia an appeal.djvu/11

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exclusively appropriated to the benefit of a strange people, are totally overlooked and forgotten. In plain English, it has been determined by the spoilers of a defenceless race, that the surplus of the spoil shall be annually set apart to enable swarm after swarm of adventurers from the shores of Britain to join the gang, for the purpose of carrying on the work of plunder. By what other term can the policy pursued towards Australia be designated? The sarcasm of the Roman, is but too applicable to those both at home and abroad who have enriched themselves by our colonial possessions in the Pacific, that, "if every man were to have his own, they would be obliged to return to the straw-built habitations of their forefathers." The very dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their master's table; but not a crumb is allowed to the Australian. Of the thousands and tens of thousands, the annual proceeds of the sale of his lands, and the hundreds of thousands that are annually accumulating in private fortunes from the agriculture and the commerce of his country, not a single pound is appropriated to the improvement of his state in this world or his prospects in another. Robbed and wounded by the thieves among whom he has fallen, he is left bleeding in the bush and abandoned to his fate, unless by chance some Samaritan, wandering through the forest, should be moved with compassion at the sight of his misfortunes.

Throw aside for a moment, My Lord, the dispatches, letters, and papers which, from the colonial empire over which you preside, are, I am aware, continually pouring in upon you—a mountain of trash under which the table in Downing Street groans—reflect upon the sad condition of the Australian—it is a case of paramount importance—and think, whether a few thousand pounds out of the proceeds of the sales made by the Crown, might not in each colony, be annually set apart to ameliorate and improve the condition of a people whose lands are thus seized and sold for the benefit of others. This will not touch the revenues of the empire, nor the pockets of those who are ever ready to exclaim against taxation for any thing but their own selfish interest, or their whims. It will be a trifle, and but a trifle, from funds which belong to neither the Chancellor of the Exchequer nor the people; and which Her Majesty can, by a single word, reserve for the rightful owners, out of whose inheritance so much has been already taken to enrich Her Majesty's subjects.

Let it not be imagined for a moment that I am opposed to conquest, when justly provoked; or to colonization, when it can be carried into effect without injury to the original occupiers of the soil. British sway, notwithstanding the mal-administra-