impression produced upon the mind of the natives by treatment like this?
Can it engender feelings otherwise than of a hostile and vindictive kind;
or can we wonder that he should take the first opportunity of venting
those feelings upon his aggressor?

But let us go even a little further, and suppose the case of a settler,
who, actuated by no selfish motives, and blinded by no fears, does not
discourage or repel the natives upon their first approach; suppose that
he treats them with kindness and consideration (and there are happily
many such settlers in Australia), what recompense can he make them for
the injury he has done, by dispossessing them of their lands, by
occupying their waters, and by depriving them of their supply of food? He
neither does nor can replace the loss. They are sometimes allowed, it is
true, to frequent again the localities they once called their own, but
these are now shorn of the attractions which they formerly
possessed--they are no longer of any value to them--and where are they to
procure the food that the wild animals once supplied them with so
abundantly? In the place of the kangaroo, the emu, and the wallabie, they
now see only the flocks and herds of the strangers, and nothing is left
to them but the prospect of dreary banishment, or a life of misery and
privation. Can it then be a matter of wonder, that under such
circumstances as these, and whilst those who dispossessed them, are
revelling in plenty near them, they should sometimes be tempted to
appropriate a portion of the superabundance they see around them, and rob
those who had first robbed them? The only wonder is, that such acts of
reprisal are so seldom committed. Where is the European nation, that thus
situated, and finding themselves, as is often the case with the natives,
numerically and physically stronger than their oppressors, would be
guilty of so little retaliation, of so few excesses? The eye of
compassion, or of philanthropy, will easily discover the anomalous and
unfavourable position of the Aborigines of our colonies, when brought
into contact with the European settlers. They are strangers in their own
land, and possess no longer the usual means of procuring their daily
subsistence; hungry, and famished, they wander about begging among the
scattered stations, where they are treated with a familiarity by the men
living at them, which makes them become familiar in turn, until, at last,
getting impatient and troublesome,