MODERN CIVILIZATION—THE NATIVES.

 One of the most revolting and disgraceful sophisms by which private cupidity has successfully deluded the British Government into measures for the interests of a few individuals, under the pretext of a principle of public law and right, sanctioned by reason and religion, is that the native uncivilized inhabitants of a country, the wild aborigines, are not the rightful owners of the land of their nativity, the land which they merely live upon, but do not cultivate; that the foreign colonists, who intrude into, settle on, and cultivate this land, become ipso facto, the legitimate owners, and may expel the aborigines who do not cultivate it, but merely live upon it by hunting fishing, and gathering the roots, fruits, and spontaneous products of the soil; and may do so justly, by the law of God and man. The natives have no rights of property, according to this sophism, in the soil of their native land, because they do not plough, sow, and reap, and make it available for a civilized subsistence. On this new principle in the moral code, our encroachments on the natives of New Zealand, the grants by our Government to speculating land companies on the Exchange of London, of land of which the natives had a distinct appropriation among themselves by tribes, and proprietary rights which no individual of a tribe had a power to alienate—our deportation of all the natives of Van Diemen's Land whom we had not starved or massacred, to Flinders Island in Bass Strait, where the miserable remnant of the people we tore from their native home are perishing from the face of the earth—the American aggressions on, and occupation of the hunting territories of the the Indian tribes, and the French razzias in Africa for the purpose of establishing civilized agricultural colonies in a land now only occupied or overrun by the wandering Arab tribes and their flocks, may all be justified,—all are deeds equally conformable to this law of nature and of nations, that the more civilized may, as matter of right, seize on the land which the less civilized do not use and cultivate. It is reasoned thus, and this reasoning is unblushingly avowed and acted upon by our land speculators who receive, and by our colonial department which grants allotments of land in Australia and New Zealand. The earth, it is piously observed, was given by its Creator to man to live on, to use and cultivate, so as to produce a civilized subsistence for the human race in the highest moral and Christian state which human nature here on earth can attain, therefore, if a wild uncivilized race of natives in a country merely wander over its surface, living on its spontaneous productions, the wild fruits, game, fish, without cultivating the land, and raising a more abundant and civilized subsistence out of it, they may be justly, legitimately, and on right principle before God and man, driven out, and dispossessed by those who can cultivate the land and bring it by their industry to the use for which it was intended by the Creator, the abode of civilized Christian men. Now the premises here are right, but the conclusion is wrong. The earth is, no doubt, given to man for his support, and in a civilized rather than a savage state; but are we to conclude from this that we are to despoil, expel, or massacre our fellow men who are in a savage state, instead of reclaiming and enlightening them, if we can, and letting them alone if we cannot? The use and cultivation of the land are but relative terms. The savage who merely hunts over it, uses it for his subsistence as well as the farmer who ploughs and sows every foot of it. It is but in the quantity of subsistence derived from a given area of land, that the savage native and the civilized colonist differ as to the use of it; and if the use, the productive use, be the basis of proprietary right, what right would landlords in a civilised country, England for instance, have to their estates, if it could be demonstrated that others, for example their tenants, understood and could practice agriculture, or the productive cultivation of land, much better, and therefore had a better right to the property of the land, since they could produce more subsistence for man from it ? Civilization itself is but a relative term, and can confer no legitimate right on man in one state, to appropriate to themselves what is not their own, but the neglected property of men in another state. On a jury we would hold it to be no excuse for a thief, that the man whose pocket he had picked was drunk, or blind, or an idiot. Our Colonial department not only admits the excuse, but acts upon it. The right of our Government to the land which it has granted in Australia to emigration companies or individual settlers, stands upon no better grounds, socially, morally, or religiously considered, than this sophism affords. The principle and the practice of our colonization in Australia and New Zealand will be the indelible blot on British history in the nineteenth century.

South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register (Adelaide, SA : 1845 - 1847), Saturday 3 April 1847, page 4