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Untitled Article
we must , as Mr Earl advises , take a glance at the ancient history of Great Britain ^* " Their Southern neighbours / ' says Gibbon , " have felt , and perhaps exaggerated ,
the cruel depredations of the Scots and Picts ; and a valiant tribe of Caledonia , the Atta-CQtti , the enemies and afterwards soldiers of Valentian , are accused , by an eye-witness , of delighting in the taste of human flesh . * * * * If in the
neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow , a race of cannibals has really existed , we may contemplate in the period of the Scottish history the opposite extremes of savage and civilised life . Such reflexions tend to
enlarge the circle of our ideas , and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand will produce , in some future age , the Hume of the Southern hemisphere , " * Commerce , which binds the interests of men
together , just as war separates and opposes them , has already made a step towards the destruction of anthropophagy in New Zealand . The fear of offending the European makes the New Zealander conceal his
monstrous repast ; he begins to associate an idea of shame with it ; and the better feeling thus begun will ere long repress the appetite itself . In fact , it never has molested the
European , but on very few occasions , when provoked by aggression . It was then at
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most no worse than a custo * mary climax to justified warfare . On one occasion , it is related , the master of a vessel
undertook to carry home a chief from Sidney . On the passage he obliged this man , a chief , to work like a common sailor j and feven went so far as to have
him flogged * On reaching their destination the chief published his wrongs , and his countrymen manifested their indignation . The master made light of their threats , and took no precautions , conciliatory or defensive . The consequence was one of those massacres which
have shocked us here in England , where we assumed that the wrong was altogether on the side of the victors . Let us suppose that a Frenchman had undertaken a few years back to convey a Highland chief from Dunkirk to his native
coast , and had flogged him by the way ; and that a massacre had ensued . Would the blame have been imputed to the Scot , or to the Frenchman ?
To the peaceable missionaries , and the amicable whalers no violence has been offered . The former sit , and sleep , with their doors and windows unbarred , secure in the faith of their dark neighbours . !
The New Zealander , in fact , is neither so crafty , so inexorable , nor so formidable as the Red Indian of America . His musket is not for ever practised upon game like the rifle of the American , and his implacability
• Gibbon ' s Decline and Fall ; quoted in The British Colonization of New Zealand , p . 273 . f Pp , 208 , 228 , 267 .
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The Colonization tof New Zealand * 34 ?
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 1, 1837, page 347, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1837/page/51/
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