“After the first prospectors came those of whom Burns might have been thinking when he sang,—
“‘Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.’”
“Well, doctor, it’s true I haven’t seen much of miners yet, but the only two I know are of the old school, and they certainly deserve the encomium you borrowed from Wordsworth. But, by-the-bye, I wanted to ask you, do you remember that surveyor telling us about the permission given to a man, I forget his name, some years since, by the Queensland government, to shoot any aboriginal he came across, because his family had all been massacred by some tribe whose land they had taken? Was it a fact or a yarn of our friend’s inventive powers?”
“Not a bit of it; true as logic, and not the only case. Frazer was the man’s name who had the permission given to him. Why, I travelled up here only two years since with a fellow who had a similar sort of ‘license to kill.’ He was going to some part of the Gulf” (of Carpentaria) “to revenge his brother’s death by killing all the blacks he might come across. This Frazer went about for years shooting all and every native he could see, ‘station boys,’ warragals, or town blacks,—he was not very particular. It became a kind of mania with him; and at last, having killed a favourite boy of some influential squatter, there was a bit of trouble over it, and he had to leave off further sacrificing to the Manes of his people, except out of the way of newspaper folk.
“I once knew an inspector of police, who’s dead now, who asked my advice professionally about himself. He said that after some years of this man-hunting, he found himself suffering from a growing morbid desire to kill everything alive he saw. He was distracted with an idea that haunted him, that he might be unable to restrain himself some day,—‘run amuck’ amongst the townsfolk or his own family; become a new kind of Helene Iegado, in fact.”
“That’s an admirable peg, doctor, to hang a sensational tale on,—a man haunted by the spectre of murder that he has raised himself, and which he fears will some day make him turn his assassin’s knife against his own beloved.”
“Oh, the disease is well-known,—a phase of that called cerebral hyperæmia,” continued the doctor; “but it is rarer in the more civilized countries than elsewhere. I consider the mere fact of an educated, civilized man being able to continue to act the part of wholesale exterminator of human beings, at so much a month, is a prima facie sign of insanity of the type Sir Henry Parkes mentioned the other day to a deputation that waited upon him. Wonderful man, Sir Henry, knows everything. Have you seen him?”
“Yes, but what did he say to the deputation? He didn’t call them lunatics to their faces, did he?”
“Not exactly, though he did so in a roundabout way. No, the deputation was composed of a number of good, soft-hearted, but also soft-headed, old fogies, who wanted to obtain a reprieve for the late-lamented murderer Hewett. ‘Sir ’Enry,’ as the Bulletin calls him, received them kindly, but sensibly refused to accede to their request, saying, ‘There are few persons save scientific inquirers who are aware of the number of people who take delight in acts of deliberate cruelty.’ I think it is Dr. Marshall Hall, no, it’s Andrew Winter, on ‘Insanity,’ says:—”