is not very difficult to distinguish the guilty
from the innocent, for they are a simple-minded race, little skilled in
the arts of dissimulation.

"It is bad enough that a great part of the colonists are inimical to the
natives; it is worse that the law, as it stands at present, does not
extend its protection to them; but it is too bad when the press lends its
influence to their destruction. Such, however, is undoubtedly the case.
When Messrs. Biddle and Brown were murdered, the newspapers entertained
their readers week after week with the details of the bloody massacre,
heaping a profusion of vile epithets upon the perpetrators. But of the
slaughter by the soldiers, (who killed no less than four innocent
natives, while they captured not one guilty party), among the tribes who
had had nothing to do with the murders--of the treachery of attacking in
the darkness of the night, a tribe who had the day before been hunting
kangaroo with their informers, when one of the former guides to the
magistrates' pursuing party was killed amongst others; of the wanton
outrage on the mutilated body of one of the victims;--of these things the
press was as silent as the grave."

Without attempting to enlarge more fully upon the subjects entered upon
in the preceding pages, I trust that I have sufficiently shewn that the
character of the Australian natives has been greatly misrepresented and
maligned, that they are not naturally more irreclaimably vicious,
revengeful, or treacherous than other nations, but on the contrary, that
their position with regard to Europeans, places them under so many
disadvantages, subjects them to so many injuries, irritates them with so
many annoyances, and tempts them with so many provocations, that it is a
matter of surprise, not that they sometimes are guilty of crime, but that
they commit it so rarely.

If I have in the least degree succeeded in establishing that such is the
case, it must be evident that it is incumbent upon us not only to make
allowances when pronouncing an opinion on the character or the crimes of
the Aborigines; but what is of far greater and more vital importance, as
far as they are concerned, to endeavour to revise and improve such parts
of our system and policy towards them as are defective, and by better
adapting these to the peculiar circumstances of this people, at once
place them upon juster and more equal terms, and thus excite a reasonable
hope that some eventual ameliorati