EFFECTS OF CONTACT WITH EUROPEANS. 413 
fatal and inexplicable influence; history will record, 
I fear, similar results for the many nations who are 
now struggling ; alas, how vainly, against this deso- 
lating cause. Year by year, the melancholy and 
appalling truth is only the more apparent, and as 
each new instance multiplies upon us, it becomes 
too fatally confirmed, until at last we are almost, in 
spite of ourselves, forced to the conviction, that the 
first appearance of the white men in any new coun- 
try, sounds the funeral knell of the children of the 
soil. In Africa, in the country of the Bushmen, Mr. 
Moffat says — 
“ I have traversed those regions, in which, according to the 
testimony of the farmers, thousands once dwelt, drinking at 
their own fountains, and killing their own game ; but now, 
alas, scarcely is a family to be seen ! It is impossible to look 
over those now uninhabited plains and mountain glens without 
feeling the deepest melancholy, whilst the winds moaning in 
the vale seem to echo back the sound, ‘Where are they?’ ” 
Another author, with reference to the Cape Colony, 
remarks — 
“ The number of natives, estimated at the time of the dis- 
covery at about 200,000, are stated to have been reduced, or 
cut off, to the present population of about 32,000, by a con- 
tinual system of oppression, which once begun, never slack- 
ened.” 
Catlin gives a feeling and melancholy account 
of the decrease of the North American Indians,* 
and similar records might be adduced of the sad 
* Vide Catlin’s American Indians, vol. i. p. 4 & 5, and vol. ii. 
p. 238. 
