ERRORS OF THEORETICAL WRITERS REGARDING THE SAVAGE STATE.
No question has, in as far as I can apprehend the subject, been so
utterly misunderstood and misrepresented as the one relating to the
customs and traditional laws of savage races. Deistical writers and
philosophers of great note but small experience have built up whole
theories, and have either overturned or striven to overturn ancient
faiths and wholesome laws by arguments deduced, in the first instance,
from the consideration of man in his simple or savage state; and from
false premises they have deduced, logically, argument from argument,
until even the most unwilling have begun to doubt.
COMPLEX LAWS OF SAVAGE LIFE.
But to believe that man in a savage state is endowed with freedom either
of thought or action is erroneous in the highest degree. He is in reality
subjected to complex laws which not only deprive him of all free agency
of thought, but at the same time, by allowing no scope whatever for the
development of intellect, benevolence, or any other great moral
qualification, they necessarily bind him down in a hopeless state of
barbarism from which it is impossible for man to emerge so long as he is
enthralled by these customs; which, on the other hand, are so ingeniously
devised as to have a direct tendency to annihilate any effort that is
made to overthrow them.
This people reject in practice all idea of the equality of persons or
classes; they make indeed no verbal distinctions upon this point, and if
asked, were all men equal? they would be unable to comprehend the
question; but there is no race that imposes more irksome restraints upon
certain classes of the community.
CHARACTER OF THE NATIVE CUSTOMS. THEIR GENERALITY.
The whole tendency of their superstitions and traditional regulations is
to produce the effect of depriving certain classes of benefits which are
enjoyed by others; and this monopolizing of advantages often possesses
amongst savages many characteristics which violate all the holier
feelings of our nature, and excite a disgust of which it is divested in
civilized life. In the latter case we see certain privileges even
hereditarily enjoyed; but the weak and strong, the rich and poor, the
young and old have paths of honourable ambition laid open to them by
entering on which they can gain like immunities. While in the savage
condition we find the female sex, the young, and the weak, condemned to a
hopeless state of degradation and to a lasting deprivation of particular
advantages merely because they are defenceless; and what they are
deprived of is given to others merely because they are old or strong: and
this is not effected by personal violence, depending upon momentary
caprice and individual disposition (in which case it might be considered
as the consequence of a state of equality) but it is enforced upon the
natives of Australia by traditional laws and customs which are by them
considered as valid and binding as our laws are by us.
CONSIDERATIONS ON THEIR ORIGIN.
The laws and customs alluded to cannot be considered as mere local
institutions, for travellers and residents in the northern provinces of
the colony of New South Wales describe as existing there usages nearly
identical with those which regulate the proceedings of the natives
occupying the west of the continent. And these testimonies cannot be
doubted for they are incidentally introduced without any theoretical bias
and in ignorance of the conformity they tend to prove. Natives from the
country about the Murrumbidgee have described to me Australian customs as
being in force there which exhibit the same accordance with those I found
in the west; and I have myself ascertained their existence on several
other portions of the continent. But it is remarkable that, although so
many persons have described isolated customs of this people, no one has
yet taken the trouble to digest them into one mass, and to exhibit them
in the aggregate, so that an inference might be drawn as to how far the
state in which the natives of Australia are at present found is caused by
the institutions to which they are subjected.
We find then, in Australia, the remarkable fact that the inhabitants of a
tract of country nearly two thousand miles in breadth are governed by the
same institutions: and what renders this more singular is that the people
submitted to them are not subjected by written rules of faith, which the
chiefs of each race may interpret and modify according to their will; as
is the case with those who are governed by the Koran or other similar
codes; but in this instance mere oral traditions are handed down, which
teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed under certain
penalties, and without the aid of fixed records, or the intervention of a
succession of authorized depositaries and expounders these laws have been
transmitted from father to son through unknown generations, and are fixed
in the minds of the people as sacred and unalterable.
DEISTICAL REVERIES CONFUTED BY EXPERIENCE.
One common mode of argument among deistical writers is to imagine
barbarous man let loose upon the earth without undergoing any previous
preparation for the scene upon which he was about to enter; and they then
trace out how, urged on by his necessities and aided by his senses, he
successively discovered the natural productions necessary for his
subsistence and the arts which ministered to his wants, until step by
step he mounted to the pinnacle of civilization. But these are merely
reveries of the closet, dreams of the inexperienced, and have no real
foundation in as far at least as Australia is concerned. That the first
natives who were placed on that continent must have been instructed how
to provide for their wants, how to form weapons suited to their
circumstances, how to select roots, and to capture animals fitted for
food, has been demonstrated over and over again, but at no time more
forcibly than when the portion of my party, under Mr. Walker, were coming
overland from Gantheaume Bay to Perth. In this case six full-grown men,
provided with knives, fishing-hooks and lines, a kettle, vessels to hold
water and cook their food, arms, and a small quantity of ammunition, and
many of them possessing considerable experience in the bush, must all
have perished from hunger had not timely assistance reached them; and
this from their ignorance as to which of the productions surrounding them
would serve to support life, and not from neglect in making the requisite
experiments to endeavour to ascertain this, for the poor fellows ate
everything they could find which appeared to afford sustenance; yet
notwithstanding all the comparative advantages they were in possession
of, if the relief sent from Perth had not reached them, death must have
overtaken all. The same result has frequently occurred under nearly
similar circumstances. If then men, full-grown, in the complete
possession of all their faculties, provided with fire and many useful
implements, and aided by considerable experience, from ignorance of the
natural productions of a country, and the means of procuring these, die
from hunger ere they can learn how to supply their wants, is it probable
that an unarmed, naked, untaught man, who knew not even how to make his
senses act in concert until he had from experience acquired this
knowledge, could by any possibility have avoided a fate, which would
inevitably overtake the European in possession of all his superior
energies of mind and character, if he chance not to fall in with friendly
natives.
ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF THE NATIVE LAWS.
The laws of this people are unfitted for the government of a single
isolated family, some of them being only adapted for the regulation of an
assemblage of families; they could therefore not have been a series of
rules given by the first father to his children: again, they could not
have been rules given by an assembly of the first fathers to their
children, for there are these remarkable features about them that some
are of such a nature as to compel those subject to them to remain in a
state of barbarism, whilst others are adapted to the wants and
necessities of savage RACES, as well as to prevent too close
intermarriages of a people who preserve no written or symbolical records
of any kind; and in all these instances the desired ends are obtained by
the simplest means, so that we are necessitated to admit that, when these
rules were planned it was foreseen that the race submitted to them would
be savages, and under this foresight the necessary provision was made for
the event.
We cannot argue that this race was originally in a state of civilization,
and that from the introduction of certain laws amongst them, the tendency
of which was to reduce them to a state of barbarism, or from some other
cause, they had gradually sunk to their present condition; for in that
case how could those laws which provide solely for the necessities of a
people in their present state have been introduced amongst them? Neither
could they have been invented according to necessities and emergencies
which a savage state has produced, for under such circumstances it is
impossible that they could have been promulgated and enforced throughout
so wide a range of country, and amongst a dispersed race of barbarians of
such a variety of dispositions, who acknowledge no chief or lawgiver, and
are so characteristically impatient of restraint.
Without in this place attempting to form and to support any theories
founded upon the views I have just put forward, I may state my impression
that it would seem, from the laws and customs of the natives of
Australia, to have been willed that this people should until a certain
period remain in their present condition, which is consequently not the
result of mere accident, or of the natural constitution of man. From the
peculiar nature of their institutions it was impossible that they could
emerge from a state of barbarism whilst these remained in force, and from
the tenacity and undeviating strictness with which they are retained, and
the strong power they hold over the savage mind, it seems equally
impossible that they could have been abrogated, or even altered, until
the race subjected to them came into contact with a civilized community
whose presence might exercise a new influence, under which the ancient
system would expire or be swept away.
We may, I think, fairly produce this as a proof that the progress of
civilization over the earth has been directed, set bounds to, and
regulated by certain laws framed by Infinite wisdom; and, although such
views may by some be deemed visionary, I feel some confidence that these
laws are as certain and definite as those which control the movements of
the heavenly bodies. I believe moreover, that they are capable in some
degree of being studied and reduced to order, although no attempt to do
so has hitherto been made; and the institutions of barbarous races, their
probable origin, the effects they have upon the people submitted to them,
the evidences of design which they contain, and other similar questions,
are those points to which in this enquiry attention should be
particularly directed.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS.
The progress of events and the rapid march of science in our country are
very wonderful, but the progress of events in the eastern hemisphere at
the present moment is still more amazing: Christianity and civilization
are marching over the world with a rapidity not fully known or estimated
by any one nation; the English are scarcely aware what has been effected
by their own missionaries and commerce, and they are utterly ignorant of
what has been already done, and is now doing, by the Americans, Dutch,
and Portuguese.