TO CIVILIZE THE NATIVES. 
453 
from the many opinions or quotations to which I have 
already referred in my remarks ; many others might 
be adduced, if necessary, but one or two will suffice. 
The following extract is from a speech by A. 
Forster, Esq. at a meeting held to celebrate the 
anniversary of the South Australian Missionary 
Society, on the 6th September, 1843, and at which 
the Governor of the Colony presided : — 
“ This colony had been established for nearly seven years, and 
during the whole of that time the natives had been permitted to 
go about the streets in a state of nudity.* This was not only 
an outrage on decency and propriety, but it was demoralising 
to the natives themselves. Like Adam, after having come in 
contact with the tree of knowledge, they had begun to see their 
own nakedness, and were ashamed of it. If they could give 
them a nearer approach to humanity by clothing them ; if they 
could make them look like men, they would then, perhaps, 
begin to think like men. What he complained of was, not that 
they were in a low and miserable condition, but that no effort 
had been made to rescue them from that condition. 
“ The circumstances, too, of the aborigines called upon them 
for increased exertion. They were wasting away with disease — 
they were dying on the scaffold — they were being shot down in 
mistake for native dogs, and their bleeding and ghastly heads 
had been exhibited on poles, as scare-crows to their fellows.” 
The report of the Missionary Society, read on 
the same occasion, says, 
“ Though it is undeniable that there is much to discourage in 
the small results which can yet be reckoned from these efforts, 
* And yet a law is passed, subjecting natives, who appear 
thus, to punishment ! — How are they to clothe themselves ? 
