wear out, and gradually to decay: they diminish in numbers; they appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth. I am led to apprehend that within a very limited period, a few years," adds the Bishop, "those who are most in contact with Europeans will be utterly extinct—I will not say exterminated—but they will be extinct."
As to their moral condition, the bishop says of the natives around Sidney—"They are in a state which I consider one of extreme degradation and ignorance; they are, in fact, in a situation much inferior to what I suppose them to have been before they had any communication with Europe." And again, in his charge, "It is an awful, it is even an appalling consideration, that, after an intercourse of nearly half a century with a Christian people, these hapless human beings continue to this day in their original benighted and degraded state. I may even proceed farther, so far as to express my fears that our settlement in their country has even deteriorated a condition of existence, than which, before our interference, nothing more miserable could easily be conceived. While, as the contagion of European intercourse has extended itself among them, they gradually lose the better properties of their own character, they appear in exchange to acquire none but the most objectionable and degrading of ours."
The natives about Sidney and Paramatta are represented as in a state of wretchedness still more deplorable than those resident in the interior.
"Those in the vicinity of Sidney are so completely changed, they scarcely have the same pursuits now; they go about the streets begging their bread, and
