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When they change their residence they always carry with them a few lighted embers which rest in their canoes upon a bed of pebbles or ashes. The same thing occurs, moreover, among the Australians and Tasmanians, who employ, as we have just seen, the rotary process.
A Wallace might harass a large army with a small and determined band; but the contending parties were at least equal in arms and civilization. The Zulus who fought us in Africa, the Maories in New Zealand, the Arabs in the Soudan, were far better provided with weapons, more advanced in the science of war, and considerably more numerous, than the naked Tasmanians.
Now, we are told that the home of the third race was on the continent "Lemuria," which stretched across the Indian Ocean. I imagine the Tasmanians, the Papuans, and the degraded races of that part of the world to be fragments of the third race. Query: Is the famous click of the Zulu a remainder of the gradual passage from animal noise to human articulation in speech?
In the museum at Hobart are portraits of a good many, with unpronounceable names. By the Australians, Tasmania is sometimes called "sleepy hollow," and certainly, compared with their neighbours across the water, the Tasmanians do appear to be deficient in energy. The revenue of the country is, indeed, increasing, though slowly. There are now only about 400,000 acres under cultivation.
You may end it with fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion; you may enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did the Caribs; you may set it boundaries and then poison it slowly with deleterious commodities, as the Americans do with most of their Indians; you may incite it to wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to live under new and strange conditions that will expose it to infectious diseases to which you yourselves are immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians; you may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did with the Tasmanians; or you can maintain such conditions as conduce to "race suicide," as the British administration does in Fiji.
The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organic equilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, from the correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spread effects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like the Tasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different from those with which their ancestors were familiar.
These, taken together with their high abilities in boat-building, and their tastes and capacities in the ornamental arts modify their savagery to a semi-civilization or at least to, a quarter-civilization. It is a compliment to them that the British did not exterminate them, as they did the Australians and the Tasmanians, but were content with subduing them, and showed no desire to go further.
Accordingly, it was not long before the Tasmanians were informed by the Governor that transportation should, in a short time, be discontinued.
Bonwick, in his work on the Tasmanians, testifies to the modesty exhibited by the naked females of that race, who by the decorum of their postures gave evidence of the possession in germ of what under circumstances would become the highest chastity and refinement.
That opened the way along the trench, and they found the three machine-gunners, shot as the sergeant had said. The Tasmanians went swiftly along the trench after that, and presently saw a row of good Australian heads in a sap well in front of them. There went up a cheer.
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