of their illicit intercourse with their own but poorer countrywomen.
It is not upon the first convicts only of these settlements, but upon those of all subsequent periods, that the sad charge can be laid; and not of convicts only, but those of higher position, free from legal restraint. It is not often, however, that such a narrative can be written as that by Mr. G. A. Murray, Police Magistrate on the river Murrumbidgee. He was officially informed that eleven half-caste boys had been decoyed, murdered, and afterwards their bodies consumed to ashes in separate fires. He rode to the spot, saw the remains of the fires, and, in raking about the ashes, discovered fragments of human bones. In his evidence he averred that though female half-castes were sometimes permitted to live, the males were invariably destroyed in his district. Even the former were tolerated only as ministering to the lustful appetites of the tribe, and an additional means of obtaining supplies from lascivious white men. The mother of one of the slaughtered infants sought to deprecate the anger of the gentleman by this: "Cawbawn me sorry; cawbawn me sorry; Black fellow always do like that."
How strange is it, then, to meet with such a passage as this in the medical works of Dr. Carpenter: "There is strong reason to believe that these hybrid races, the parents of whom are Europeans on the one side and the aborigines of any country on the other, are generally destined to become the dominant population of those countries!" Before the half-castes existed in any number, or when mostly confined to the sealers of the Straits, the Surveyor-General of Van Diemen's Land in 1823, Mr. Evans, in common with some other benevolent individuals, had a dim hope, amidst the rising horrors of the Black War, of the future utility of the half-castes. Alluding to the massacre of 1803, he continues: "The inimical impression will doubtless wear off, and the mixed race, now arising from the British seamen and the native females, will essentially contribute to bring about so desirable a reconciliation." Such a mission never was fulfilled. The Eurastians of India, the Griquas of the Cape, the Mulattoes of America, have hardly produced such a result.
It may be questioned whether more could be expected from the half-castes of the little island than from those of other parts of the world. It has been observed with pain, that, while in intellect
