“Yes, coming here from New Zealand one feels as if he had somehow descended into the slave countries of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, and the odd part of it is that its very existence is unknown in England, neither in Sydney nor Brisbane to any great extent. But these places, it is true, have their own little white slaves ‘always with them,’ as my experiences amongst the newsboys, when I got little Don, has taught me.
“Although I did pander to the local custom, against which I am speaking, in buying Joe, I trust to do something good for him to cover this sin of mine, and will bring him back to New Zealand with me.
“Any one who boasts of being the ‘free-born son of an Englishman’ cannot look coolly on at the treatment of the unfortunate blacks up here in Queensland. The poor wretches one sees forced to work by brutal squatters, carriers, ‘cockatoo’ settlers, and others, have no hope to cheer them like those mentioned by your old American poet-friend, John Greenleaf Whittier:—
“‘O’er dusky faces, seamed and old, And hands horn-hard with unpaid toil, With hope in every rustling fold, We saw your star-dropt flag uncoil.’
“No, the (five) star-drop flag of Australia, heralding the (three) star-drop (whisky) of the advancing army of locust-squatters, brings no hope, or mercy either, to the poor devils whose ancestral domains become their fields of unceasing and ‘unpaid toil.’ All the horrors depicted by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, all the sorrows sung of by the immortal Whittier, are rampant around me as I write. And it seems that it is in vain that the immorality of the horrible traffic is thundered into the ears of the various Governments—who after all are but the representatives of the squatter-kings—by various southern papers from time to time. Read the following first-rate article upon the subject, by Mr. Rose, the editor of the _Brisbane Courier_, the boss paper of the colony, which appeared on September 16th, last year.