traversing the bush on foot with a few natives, was met by two gentlemen Squatters, mounted and armed, one of whom requested Mr. S., as he spoke their language, to inform the natives that they were not to trespass on his run. Now, such an intimation will doubtless appear quite natural and proper to an Englishman, and quite consistent with the rights of property, whether held in fee-simple or on lease from the Crown. But what, I would ask, is the import of such an intimation in the peculiar circumstances supposed? And with what face, I would ask also, could a missionary make such an intimation to "the barbarous people" of his charge, who probably had "shewn him much kindness" in their own way? Translated into English it would imply some such address to the black natives on the part of the missionary as the following:

"Dearly beloved brethren, I have hitherto been telling you that the great God who made the sun, the moon, and the stars, the land, and the salt water, ‘hath made of one blood all the nations of men for to dwell upon all the face of the earth;' that his white and his black children are all alike in his sight, and that he hath sent his Son from heaven to die for you, to bless and to save you. But I have now to tell you that the great white Jin* beyond the salt water requires your country for the cattle and sheep of her tribe, and has given the whole of it from the river back to the mountains to her brother† Mr. here, and you are not to sit down or 'walk all about' over it, to hunt the kangaroo and opossum, or to gather bangwall, any more. No doubt it is your own country, the place where you were born, and you have no place else to sit down and walk all about,' to hunt and to gather bangwall; but remember the great white Jin is very strong, and there are many soldiers in her tribe,"

6

* Jin is the native word for woman.

Brother is a word of very extensive meaning with the natives, like the word cousin with us, in certain legal documents.

Such are the "glad tidings" which the missionary was actually requested, in the instance under consideration, to proclaim to the heathen people of his charge -such is the Squatters' gospel to the Aborigines of Australia! I have no hesitation in expressing my belief and conviction that in many, very many instances, it has been literally tantamount to a sentence of confiscation, banishment, and death to the unfortunate Aborigines.

Am I therefore to be understood as being opposed to the Squatting System, or anxious for its discontinuance? By no means. The prevalence of that system is the natural and necessary course of events in Australia, and it is not in the power of Great Britain, even if she could be so insane as to cherish the wish, to enforce its discontinuance. All we can do is to ameliorate that system in its bearings upon the Aborigines, that the white and black races may coexist in harmony and peace till the purposes of Divine Providence are accomplished in regard to the latter, or, in other words, during the very short period they will in all likelihood continue to exist at all. And I repeat it, there is nothing which in my opinion would tend so directly to ameliorate the Squatting System, in all its bearings on the unfortunate Aborigines, as the speedy influx of a numerous agricultural population from the mother country, to occupy the vast extent of superior available land to the northward, in the way I have described. Such a population would infallibly originate a healthy state of public opinion on this most important subject, which certainly does not exist in the colony at present, and before which the unprincipled wretch who would utterly disgrace his country, and humanity itself, by introducing amongst us the infernal Italian practice of poisoning, either in regard to blacks or whites, would quail and disappear.*

* If this practice is not effectually put down in the colony by public opinion, (enlightened, of course, and stimulated by a hightoned Christianity,) as far as the blacks are concerned, there is

The discontinuance of the pecuniary support granted for a time to the German Mission to the Aborigines from the Land Revenue of the Colony, and the difficulty of obtaining anything like adequate support from the colonists during the period of general disaster that ensued, produced a great change in the circumstances of the Mission, independently of the change in its prospects arising from the opening up of the Settlement to the Squatters, and rendered its future condition exceedingly precarious. In these circumstances, the Rev. Mr. Eipper, one of the clerical missionaries, abandoned the undertaking, and accepted a clerical appointment in the colony. The Rev. Mr. Schmidt, however, remained at the Mission Station till the commencement of the year 1845, when he came to Sydney, where he resided in my family till he returned to Europe in the month of May, 1846.

In the meantime, the lay-missionaries resolved to remain at the Station, having been reinforced by three additional missionaries of the same class from Berlin, in the year 1844, and having received a promise of pecuniary assistance from a missionary society which had been formed in that city, to a small extent annually. They have now a herd of cattle and a few horses, the produce of which, together with the labour of their hands in the cultivation of a small extent of land, supplies them with the necessaries of life; and they regu larly continue to improve such opportunities as offer of communicating religious instruction to the Aborigines,

reason to fear that it will not stop with them, but be extended in due time to the whites also. There is no form of criminality more extensively prevalent, more epidemical, so to speak, than this, wherever it has gained a footing, and there is none more difficult to root out of any country. "The brightest period of the Roman history," observes Mr. Hume, "is that between the beginning of the first and end of the second Punic war. Yet, at this very time, the horrid practice of poisoning, (so prevalent at present in the same country,) was so common, that, during part of a season, a praetor punished capitally, for this crime alone, about 3000 persons in a part of Italy, and found informations of this kind still multiplying upon him."

and of exercising a moral and religious influence among the white population of the humbler classes in and around Brisbane Town.

Dr. Leichhardt spent some time at the German Mission Station, as a guest of the Rev. Mr. Schmidt's, during his stay at Moreton Bay, in the year 1843, and it will doubtless not be uninteresting to the reader to peruse the following opinion of that distinguished traveller, contained in one of his interesting letters to Mr. Lynd, respecting the Mission generally. Dr. L., I may add, was rather sceptical as to any beneficial results being likely to follow from the direct influence of the Missionaries upon the Aborigines, in the way of their conversion to Christianity; but he was fully alive to the beneficial influence which such a community was likely to exert on the surrounding white population in such a Colony:

The philanthropist could never find a purer and better nucleus for the commencement of a colony than these seven families of the Missionaries are: they themselves excellent, tolerably well educated men, industrious, with industrious wives. They have twenty-two children, though very young, yet educated with the greatest care-the most obedient, the least troublesome children I have seen in this Colony or elsewhere. If the Governor was in any way a man of more comprehensive views, and if he considered the moral influence of such a little colony on the surrounding Settlers, he would not grudge them the few acres of land which they are at present in possession of—he would grant it to them for the five years of suffering they had to pass. The Missionaries have converted no black-fellows to Christianity; but they have commenced a friendly intercourse with these savage children of the bush, and have shewn to them the whitefellow in his best colour. They did not take their wives; they did not take bloody revenge when the black-fellow came to rob their garden. They were always kind, and perhaps too kind; for they threatened without executing their threatenings, and the black-fellows knew well that it was only gammon.

I visited the German Mission Station twice during my stay at Moreton Bay, on one of which occasions I spent a night at the Station, and heard the children read a portion of Scripture. They form one of the most singular, as well as interesting little groups in Her Majesty's dominions. The parents, who are all Ger

mans, knew no other than their mother-tongue when they arrived in the Colony; but they deemed it incumbent upon them, for the purposes of their Mission, to learn and to speak English only, and they have accordingly taught their children that foreign tongue exclusively. Of course they could not teach them the English accent; and the little Anglo-German colonists, entirely secluded as they are from the world, speak English with as strong a foreign accent as a German who learns our language after he has come to manhood. I had recommended the parents, several years before, to teach their children both languages, telling them they would learn both as easily as one: but they were afraid that if they taught them to speak German, they would not learn English, and with amazing self-denial, they have continued to converse with one another in their families in English, and thereby to teach their children a foreign tongue.

I can also testify with much pleasure to the beneficial influence which the Lay-Missionaries are exercising on the scattered white population of the humbler classes in and around Brisbane Town. They have already proved a blessing to several in that vicinity, in the highest sense of the word-bringing both individuals and families back to a sense of the duties of religion, and inducing a corresponding practice. They itinerate by turns in different parts of the district every Sabbath-reading the Scriptures, distributing Scriptural tracts, and expounding the word of God to all who will suffer the word of exhortation. As a specimen of the influence they are exerting in this way, I shall relate the following circumstance which was incidentally mentioned to me, from his own experience, by Mr. Gottfried Wagner, the only unmarried Missionary now at the Station, who accompanied me on horseback from the Mission Station on my return to Brisbane. On a Sabbath afternoon, in the course of his accustomed tour of itineracy, a woman in the humbler walks of life earnestly requested Mr. Wagner to go to a particular public-house in the neighbourhood, and speak