As yet Moorunde is the only place where the experiment has been made of assembling the natives and giving food to them; but as far as it has been tried, it has been proved to be eminently successful.  I am aware that the system is highly disapproved of by many of the colonists, and the general feeling among them appears to be that nothing should be given where nothing is received, or in other words, that a native should never have any thing given to him until he does some work for it.  I still maintain that the native has a right to expect, and that we are in justice bound to supply him with food in any of those parts of the country that we occupy, and to do this, too, without demanding or requiring any other consideration from him than we have already received when we took from him his possessions and his hunting grounds.  It may be all very proper to get him to work a little if we can—­and, perhaps, that might follow in time, but we have no right to force him to a labour he is unused to, and which he never had to perform in his natural state, whilst we have a right to supply him with what he has been accustomed to, but of which we had deprived him—­food.

If in our relations with the Aborigines we wish to preserve a friendly and bloodless intercourse; if we wish to have their children at our schools to be taught and educated; if we hope to bring the parents into a state that will better adapt them for the reception of christianity and civilization; or if we care about staying the rapid and lamentable ravages which a contact with us is causing among their tribes, we must endeavour to do so, by removing, as far as possible, all sources of irritation, discontent, or suffering.  We must adopt a system which may at once administer to their wants, and at the same time, give to us a controlling influence over them; such as may not only restrain them from doing what is wrong, but may eventually lead them to do what is right—­an influence which I feel assured would be but the stronger and more lasting from its being founded upon acts of justice and humanity.  It is upon these principles that I have based the few suggestions I am going to offer for the improvement of our policy towards the natives.  I know that by many they will be looked upon as chimerical or impracticable, and I fear that more will begrudge the means necessary to carry them into effect; but unless something of the kind be done—­unless some great and radical change be effected, and some little compensation made for the wrongs and injuries we inflict—­I feel thoroughly satisfied that all we are doing is but time and money lost, that all our efforts on behalf of the natives are but idle words—­voces et preterea nihil—­that things will still go on as they have been going on, and that ten years hence we shall have made no more progress either in civilizing or in christianizing them than we had done ten years ago, whilst every day and every hour is tending to bring about their certain and total extinction.