hing."
--STRZELECKI'S N. S. WALES, p. 356.]

In addition to the many other inconsistencies in our conduct towards the
Aborigines, not the least extraordinary is that of placing them, on the
plea of protection, under the influence of our laws, and of making them
British subjects. Strange anomaly, which by the former makes amenable to
penalties they are ignorant of, for crimes which they do not consider as
such, or which they may even have been driven to commit by our own
injustice; and by the latter but mocks them with an empty sound, since
the very laws under which we profess to place them, by their nature and
construction are inoperative in affording redress to the injured.

[Note 46: "To subject savage tribes to the penalties of laws with which
they are unacquainted, for offences which they, very possibly, regard as
acts of justifiable retaliation for invaded rights, is a proceeding
indefensible, except under circumstances of urgent and extreme
necessity."--Fourth Report of the Colonization Commissioners, presented to
the House of Commons, 29th July, 1840.

"The late act, declaring them naturalized as British subjects, has only
rendered them legally amenable to the English criminal law, and added one
more anomaly to all the other enactments affecting them. This
naturalization excludes them from sitting on a jury, or appearing as
witnesses, and entails a most confused form of judicial proceedings; all
which, taken together, has made of the Aborigines of Australia a
nondescript caste, who, to use their own phraseology, are 'neither black
nor white.'"--Strzelecki's N. S. Wales.]

If, in addition to the many evils and disadvantages the natives must
necessarily be subject to from our presence, we take still further into
account the wrongs they are exposed to from the ill feeling towards them
which has sometimes existed among the settlers, or their servants, on the
outskirts of the country; the annoyances they are harassed by, even where
this feeling does not exist, in being driven away from their usual haunts
and pursuits (and this is a practice often adopted by the remote grazier
as a mere matter of policy to avoid trouble or the risk of a collision);
we shall find upon the whole that they have often just causes of offence,
and that there are many circumstances connected with their crimes which,
from the peculiar position they are placed in, may well require from us
some mitigation of the punishment that would be exact