Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land eBook

William Wentworth
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 352 pages of information about Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land.

Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land eBook

William Wentworth
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 352 pages of information about Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land.
and firm becomes their entanglement.  Lamentable as undoubtedly must be such a hopeless state of servitude, it still appears to them preferable to the precincts of a prison.  They respire the free invigorating air of their plains, and can still traverse them at their option, or at least when the season arrives which closes their daily task.  But this privilege, it must be confessed, is purchased at its uttermost value.  We have philanthropists among us, who justly commiserate the condition of that unoffending race of people, who dragged from the scenes of their nativity, and the habitations of their fathers, have been consigned by a gang of merciless kidnappers to perpetual slavery themselves, and to the still more intolerable necessity of bequeathing an existence of similar endurement and degradation to their offspring.  After years of strenuous indefatigable exertion these friends of humanity, these noble champions of liberty have succeeded, if not in emancipating those, who had already been consigned to this unmerited doom, at least in preventing the further extension of this infernal traffic.  Would it not be an effort worthy the same philanthropy, which has thus secured the protection and deliverance of unoffending Africa, to procure the emancipation of suffering Australasia? to raise her from the abject state of poverty, slavery, and degradation, to which she is so fast sinking, and to present her a constitution, which may gradually conduct her to freedom, prosperity, and happiness?

It must be admitted that this state of slavery, so galling to the subjects of a free country, has been in some measure imposed on the colonists by their own imprudent extravagance.  Already but too much inclined by their early habits of irregularity to licentious indulgence, the prosperous state of their affairs during the first fifteen years after the foundation of the settlement, presented the strongest inducements to a revival of their ancient propensities, which had been repressed, but not subdued.  Imagining that the same unlimited market, which was then offered for their produce, would always continue, they only thought of consuming the fruits of their industry; not doubting that the same fields, which thus lavishly administered to the gratification of their desires, would amply suffice for the more moderate enjoyments of their offspring.  But when once their produce began to exceed the demand of the government, and when in a short time afterwards from the want of due encouragement, all the various avenues of industry that lay open were successively filled, and the means of occupation eithergreatly circumscribed, or entirely exhausted, these people, so long habituated to unrestrained indulgence, found it difficult to support that privation, which became incumbent on their condition; and in order to procure those luxuries of which they so severely felt the want, exhausted their credit, and ended by alienating their possessions.  There can be but

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Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.