These are but specimens of cruelties, too numerous and too horrible to relate. The blacks, of course, retaliated, and military parties were sent out against them. On the 31st October, 1828, the executive council of the colony declared in their minutes, "that the outrages of the aboriginal natives amount to a complete declaration of hostilities against the settlers generally," but they forgot to add that these hostilities had been provoked in every instance by the wanton aggression of the Europeans. Martial law was again proclaimed in October, 1830, against the natives, and the governor at length determined to call upon the inhabitants to take up arms, and join the troops in forming a military cordon, by means of which he proposed to drive the aborigines into Tasman's Peninsula. The inhabitants responded to the call, and an armed force of between two and three thousand men were in the field from the 4th October till the 26th November; but the attempt entirely failed. Mr. Marsden lived to see the beginnings of a better system, though from his advanced age he was now no longer able to take an active part in the formation of new institutions. Before his death, a society had been formed in the colony for the protection of the aborigines, and government had also appointed protectors to defend them against wanton outrage. This was a great advance in a colony where, Lieutenant Sadleir (who had the charge of the school at Paramatta for the aborigines) tells us, that on his first tour up the country he saw the skull of a celebrated native, in which was visible the hole where the ball had penetrated the forehead, placed over a gentleman's bookcase in his sitting-room; "a trophy," he says, "which he prized very much, of his success in one of those exterminating excursions then sometimes undertaken, when the natives were hunted down like beasts of prey to be destroyed." But it was not till the year 1839 that an act was passed by the legislative council giving extensive powers to certain "commissioners of lands," who were also magistrates of the territory, to put a stop to the atrocities so extensively committed beyond the boundaries, both by the aborigines and the European settlers. The governor drew attention to this act in a proclamation worthy of his high office. "As human beings," he remarks, "partaking of our common nature, as the aboriginal possessors of the soil from which the wealth of the country has been principally derived, and as subjects of the queen, whose authority extends over every part of New Holland, the natives of the colony have an equal right with the people of European origin to the protection and assistance of the law of England.