Savage Man Is A Dog.") Baudin Carried Away From His Visits
To The Abodes Of Untutored Races No Truer Notion Than Came From His Own
Unsubstantiated Sentiments, Nourished By No Contact With Facts, But
Imbibed Uncritically From The Rhetorical Rhapsodists Of Rousseau's
School.
Crabbe summed them up in half a dozen lines:
"Tis the savage state
Is only good, and ours sophisticate!
See! the free creatures in their woods and plains,
Where without laws each happy monarch reigns,
King of himself - while we a number dread,
By slaves commanded and by dunces led."
Peron spoke of savage peoples, not with less sympathy but with a sympathy
grounded on knowledge; and he wasted no words about the "injustice" of
occupying lands which the aboriginal only used in the sense that lands
are "used" by rabbits and dingoes. Peron's appreciation of well-observed
facts gave him some political insight in the philosophical sense, and he
comprehended the development of which the country was capable. Could
Baudin's shade visit to-day the shores that he traversed more than a
century ago, he would surely acknowledge that orchards of ripening fruit,
miles of golden grain, millions of white fleeces, the cattle of a
thousand hills, great cities throbbing with immense energies, and a
commerce of ever augmenting vastness, ministering to the happiness of
free and prosperous populations, are, in the large ledger of humanity, an
abundant compensation for the disappearance of the few companies of naked
savages whom, when civilisation once invaded their ancestral haunts,
neither the agencies of government nor philanthropy could save from the
processes of decay.
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