


2 ; JOURNAL OF CIVILISATION. 

instances it is otherwise, but the purchase of what is reall 
desirable would amount annually to a considerable sum. 
The ignorance of our race which is thus sustained, with th 
various evils springing from it, supplies a powerful motive for th 
diffusion of sound and valuable knowledge in another and a nove 
form, and this is enforced by important considerations. Man 
wherever he appears, has indefeisible claims to all the privilege 
of brotherhood. A savage, he asks to be civilised ; ignorant, t: 
be taught ; wretched, to be made happy; prostrate in abjec: 
and torturing degradation, to be raised to the intellectual anc 
moral dignity of a being created in “ the image of God.” No 
are cases wanting, in which distance, often reducing his voice to: 
whisper, and even rendering it totally inaudible, is now abso 
lutely annihilated ; and the connexion between us and him is a 
intimate as that which subsists between ourselves and the vas’ 
mass of human life amidst which we daily and hourly move 
Tho suppliant for aid, although adorned with other colours anc 
speaking another language, dwells in owr village, in our street 
at our door. 
For are not our countrymen, our kindred, increasing the colo- 
nies of Britain, where there have long been other owners of the 
soil? And do not the aborigines of these climes urge on us an 
irresistible plea? Conquest, too, is extending the range of 
Britain’s sceptre, and ought not the vanquished to feel that its 
power is peculiarly benign? There was always a bond between 
ourselves and the New Zealanders, or the people of Afghanistan 
-—the bond arising from oneness of blood—but recent events have 
added largely to its fibres, and given it unprecedented tenacity 
and strength, 
rf 

