a local magistrate the smallest modicum of discretion. He has only
one course to pursue, and that is, to commit the offender for trial
at the next Quarter Sessions, to be held in the capital of the
colony. Accordingly the poor native, who would rather have been
flayed alive than sent into confinement for two months previous to
trial, whilst his wives are left to their own resources, is heavily
ironed, lest he should escape, and marched down some sixty or seventy
miles to Fremantle gaol, where the denizen of the forest has to
endure those horrors of confinement which only the untamed and
hitherto unfettered savage can possibly know.

Among savages, the 'Lex talionis' -- the law of retaliation -- is the
law of nature and of right; to abstain from avenging the death of a
relative would be considered, by the tribe of the deceased, an act of
unpardonable neglect. Their own customs, which are to them as laws,
point out the mode of vengeance. The nearest relative of the
deceased must spear his slayer. Nothing is more common among these
people than to steal one another's wives; and this propensity affords
a prolific source of bloodshed.

They have also a general law, which is never deviated from, and which
requires that whenever a member of a tribe dies, whether from
violence or otherwise, a life must be taken from some other tribe.
This practice may have originated in a desire to preserve the balance
of power; or from a belief, which is very general among them, that a
man never dies a natural death. If he die of some disorder, and not
of a spear-wound, they say he is "quibble gidgied," or speared by
some person a long distance off. The native doctor, or wise man of
the tribe, frequently pretends to know who has caused the death of
the deceased; and the supposed murderer is of course pursued and