2 
INTRODUCTION. 
the higher race to depress and destroy the inferior. This has 
been the fruitful cause of the greatest enormities : man has 
treated his fellow men as beasts of the field, and has bought 
and sold them as such : it is only in the present generation 
that an effort has been made to efface this blot on our boasted 
civilization, and even yet the Anglo-American Christian 
maintains its lawfulness. Whole races of aborigines have 
disappeared; they have not been considered as entitled to hold 
their own inheritance. The entire continent of America was 
taken away from its inhabitants and solemnly bestowed by the 
Roman Pontiff, on those who went to plunder and destroy 
them; and even in our own colonies, how much have we to 
blush for ! The Australian has been shot and poisoned and 
plundered of his lands ; the Tasmanian was hunted with dogs 
and exterminated, and that too by the authority of govern¬ 
ment itself. In New Zealand, there is little doubt something 
similar would have taken place, if the natives had not been too 
numerous, too warlike, and too intelligent to be thus dealt 
with; otherwise the order to seize all their waste lands, as 
they were styled, would doubtless have been attempted; but 
even these qualifications would have been of little avail, had 
not the Almighty cast his shield over them as a portion of the 
household of faith. 
To raise a better and more correct view, of those commonly 
regarded as savages, we must have a more perfect acquaintance 
with them, and the more intimate this is, the more readily shall 
we allow their claims to brotherhood, and feel assured, from 
whatever causes they have fallen into their present degraded 
state, that it is not their natural one, but the effect of various 
untoward circumstances, which have combined, gradually to 
sink them, from a higher to a lower position; and when those 
causes are removed, they will again rise to their former stand¬ 
ing, and rank with the most favored sections of the human 
family. 
As our knowledge of these aboriginal races increases, and 
we become acquainted with their language, manners, and 
customs, we find that they possess mind as well as ourselves, 
and only want similar advantages to obtain an equal enlarge- 
