OUR CIVILISATION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VII, Issue 54, 2 March 1872, Page 2

OUR CIVILISATION.

[From the Australasian.) . How proud we ought to feel rf our civilisation. A man who is moderately well off may pass from his cradle to his grave wrapped in lamb's wool, as it were. Art, science, and industry combine to minister to every want which the most refined selfishness is capable of conceiving. At home and abroad he is surrounded with evidences of what human ingenuity is on the rack to accomplish in order that none of the appliances for self-indulgence may be lacking. He cannot take up a book without meeting with some exulting allusion to this " wondrous mother age," and to what it is doing for our comfort and luxury. He cannot walk through the streets without having his attention arrested, and his self-complacency soothed by the sight of so many imposing edifices erected for divine worship, and fitted up almost as elegantly as a drawingroom. To be sure it was once authoritively declared to human beings, "Ye are temples of the most High." But we suppose modern civilisation has so corrected men's

notions on this subject as to cause them to refuse 10 recognise anything like a "temple not built by hands " in either of the five children—the eldest a girl, aged 14— who were brought up at the police court in Sandridge on the Bth iost. It is to be concluded that they have no souls, inasmuch as tbeir skins Bre not black, and they do not speak a variety of the Polynesian, or of the Negritian language. Consequently they have no claims upon the sympathies of, the good people who flock down to that same seaport in crowds to visit the missionary barque Dayspring, and to felicitate each other upon the good work which Brother Unctuous is effecting in Noukahava or Toobonai, as often as tbat vessel comes into Hobson's Bay. There is something inexpressibly shocking in a nude negro worshipping Mumbo Jumbo, and to wean him from it, no efforts are too great, no expense is too considerable. But there is nothing revolting to our Christian feeliDgs, nothing' repugnant to the sentiment of human brotherhood, nothing reproachful to our glorious civilisation, in the fact of five little children pigging together in a squalid shed, with no better companiouship than that of some drunken man, lured thither by the eldest, in order that ho might be robbed by this band of infantine brigands. They do not subsist, however, altogether upon the proceeds of tbis description of crime ; for, says tbe report, u The family was mainly kept by the wages of sin earned by the eldest girl, who reached her 14th year last September. It was her custom to frequent the pier when fresh ships arrived, and send her little brother, aged eight, to watch for the apprentices or other likely persons, and solicit their attentions on her behalf. The police had become aware of acts on her part which many abandoned profligates would have shrunk from, and in common with her younger brothers and sisters, incredible as it may seem as regards the little ones, she was frequently found drunk in the streets at all hours of the night and early morning. " Ought we not, we repeat, to be exceedingly proud of a civilisation which produces such fruit as this ? And there is plenty of ifc. On the very same day at Prabran, a young girl, aged 16, was charged with being idle and disorderly, and with having no means of support ; and three small boys were brought up for stealing money from one till, and attempting to rub another. And at Sandridge, a boy and girl, aged 11 and 8 years respectively, were dealt with by the magistrates as neglected children ; the father being in gaol on account of his inability to find sureties to keep the peace towards the mother, who is an invalid. And while these things are going on in the midst of us we receive intelligence of a waterlogged schooner — a slaver — being picked up off the coast of Queensland—with fourteen emaciated South Sea islanders and the decomposing corpses of three others on board of her. Sbe was found floating about, with their sails bent, and the helm lashed down. " There was no provision on board, and the natives were perfect skeletons in appearance from want of food." They received all the questions addressed to them in sullen silence, as they imagined they would be shot. They were evidently incapable of appreciating a civilisation associated in their minds with murder and man-stealing. Poor benighted heathen ! They had been kidnapped by members of a Christian people, and were being transported to a Christian colony, for tbe purpose of being compelled to perform servile labor for the benefit of Christian taskmasters. Not being civilised, and not being educated up to the point of understanding that " the grey barbarian " is so much " lower than the Christian child," that he ought cheerfully to submit to be sold into bondage, these ignorant savages, in all probability, rose against their kidnappers and massacred them. Or, perhaps, the latter, running short of provisions, took what Btores they had, launched their boats, and abandoned the schooner to her J ate. Be this as it may, the result is a tale of horrors as painful as that narrated in the second canto of "Don Juan," or depicted in the " Rime of the ancient Mariner," where the survivor is represented as exclaiming — "I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upan the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay." The mind shrinks from the imagination of the loathsome details of so revolting an incident as that of fourteen men being gradually starved to death under a tropical sky and in close proximity to the putrefying bodies of three of their dead companions. But, of course, all this wrongdoing, misery, and suffering are essential to the progress of civilisation, which include the cultivation of cotton and sugar by the cheapest possible method, through tbe instrumentality of black pagans stolen from tbeir homes and their families for tbat purpose by white " Christians."