a strange alternative, between destruction by our violence and our vices, and the commission of an act which in any other part or age of the world would be regarded as the most wicked and execrable. We have actually turned out the inhabitants of Van Dieman's Land, because we saw that it was "a goodly heritage," and have comfortably sate down in it ourselves; and the best justification that we can set up is, that if we did not pass one general sentence of transportation upon them, we must burn them up with our liquid fire, poison them with the diseases with which our vices and gluttony have covered us, thick as the quills on a porcupine, or knock them down with our bullets, or the axes of our wood-cutters! What an indescribable and monstrous crime must it be in the eye of the English to possess a beautiful and fertile island,—that the possessors shall be transported as convicts to make way for the convicts from this kingdom who have been pronounced by our laws too infamous to live here any longer! To such a pass are we come, that the Jezebel spirit of our lawless cupidity does not merely tell us that it will give us a vineyard, but whatever country or people we lust after.
We have then, totally cleared Van Dieman's Land of what Colonel Arthur himself, an agent of this sweeping expulsion of a whole nation, calls "a noble-minded race,"[1] and have reduced the natives of New Holland, so far as we have come in contact with them, to misery.
This is the evidence given by Bishop Broughton:—"They do not so much retire as decay; whereever Europeans meet with them, they appear to
- ↑ Despatch to Lord Goderich, 6th April, 1833.
