Seventhly, There are also other considerations to be taken into the
account, when we form our opinion of the character and conduct of the
natives, to which we do not frequently allow their due weight and
importance, but which will fully account for aggressions having been
committed by natives upon unoffending individuals, and even sometimes
upon those who have treated them kindly. First, that the native considers
it a virtue to revenge an injury. Secondly, if he cannot revenge it upon
the actual individual who injured him, he thinks that the offence is
equally expiated if he can do so upon any other of the same race; he does
not look upon it as the offence of an individual, but as an act of war on
the part of the nation, and he takes the first opportunity of making a
reprisal upon any one of the enemy who may happen to fall in his way; no
matter whether that person injured him or not, or whether he knew of the
offence having been committed, or the war declared. And is not the custom
of civilized powers very similar to this? Admitting that civilization,
and refinement, have modified the horrors of such a system, the principle
is still the same. This is the principle that invariably guides the
native in his relations with other native tribes around him, and it is
generally the same that he acts upon in his intercourse with us. Shall we
then arrogate to ourselves the sole power of acting unjustly, or of
judging of what is expedient? And are we to make no allowance for the
standard of right by which the native is guided in the system of policy
he may adopt? Weighing candidly, then, the points to which reference has
been made, can we wonder, that in the outskirts of the colony, where the
intercourse between the native and the European has been but limited, and
where that intercourse has, perhaps, only generated a mutual distrust;
where the objects, the intentions, or the motives of the white man, can
neither be known nor understood, and where the natural inference from his
acts cannot be favourable, can we wonder, that under such circumstances,
and acting from the impression of some wrong, real or imagined, or goaded