CHAPTER XIV.
DECLINE.
In taking up this painful subject—the Decline of the Tasmanians—it would be impossible to dissociate that fact from the advent of the Europeans. Though the Cacique spoke of his people as melting like snow before the sun, when the pale faces came; yet it was not in the gentle manner of the disappearance of the snow, which passes onward at the solar approach, but only to rise and greet him, to fold round his bright orb, and add increasing beauty to his beams. The Aborigines have not been suffered simply to pass off and onward before colonization, but have been hurried in their departure; and this, not by the gifts from Egyptian impatience, but by the poison of contact, and the sword of destruction.
It has been usual to associate the history of Indians and Spaniards with that of Tasmanians and Englishmen. But if there are some points of resemblance, there are, also, objects of contrast. With the one, the conquest of the Aborigines was necessary before the settlement of the country; with the other, the paucity and feebleness of the population presented no such barrier. Repeated efforts of an outraged but gentle race to extricate themselves from the grasp of those desecrators of their altars, violators of their homes, and murderers of their kindred, naturally led to their destruction. But the roamers of the gum forests were exterminated, not because of their political hostility, or for their insurrection against the Colonial Government, but when, chiefly embittered by the brutality of convict stock-keepers and shepherds, they drove off the flock to the scrub, they applied the lighted bark to the hut of the wilderness, and they hurled the spear at the solitary one.
A difference in the object should also be observed. In the establishment of Australian colonies, the motive was either the
