Volume 20 — The Colonization Of New South Wales By Great Britain. Concluded.

It is obvious, then, that, if the remarkable prosperity which has befallen the English Colonies in Australia is to be ascribed, in any degree, to the sagacity of the government that sent out the first expedition, or of those who then and subsequently presided over it, we must look for it in the perfection of the reformatory system, with a view to which the original constitution of the colony was exclusively framed. The idea of making the colonization of a newly discovered territory of prodigious resources subservient to the reformation of as many as possible of the criminals of an over-populated country is a conception of the noblest philanthropy; as the attempt to use a new and promising colony for the mere purpose of getting rid anyhow of the dangerous classes would be an act of guilty folly, the result of an indolent and heartless selfishness, such as even the most heartless and the most selfish of oligarchies should blush to have perpetrated. For the prosecution of the former object more care and pains should have been expended than under ordinary circumstances in sending out to the new settlement a colony fully equipped with all that the mother-country had to give it. The reformed, as they stepped forth from their cells and shackles, once more masters of their own actions, free agents, reinvested with reason's noblest prerogative—the liberty of choosing good and rejecting evil—should have found a sound and healthy society with which to mingle. They should have found themselves at once amidst a society based on those principles of religion, law, and justice which characterize even the feeblest form of Christian civilization. Such a society they should have found immediately outside their prison-walls, into which they might glide, as it were, unperceived, and from which they should gradually and insensibly take their tone. What man in his sober senses could have anticipated any thorough and permanent reformation of criminals in a society consisting exclusively, after making exception of the officials and the military guard, of the very criminals themselves? In reading the inaugural address of the first governor, we naturally conclude that the government which organized the expedition was deeply impressed with the necessity of an opposite course. But the illusion is soon dispelled. We discover to our astonishment that the infant colony took out with it no one condition of a civilized society. Of law there was simply none. Even the formalities of martial law, when, soon after the settlement of the penal colony, it was thought expedient to have recourse to them, were found to be impracticable, because of some technical difficulty which there had not been the sagacity to foresee and provide against. Whatever there was of justice was wholly dependent on the caprice and dispositions of individuals. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless the fact that, after the retirement of the first governor, [pg 760] the administration of the colony was entrusted for three years to the hands of the officers of the 102d Regiment. Unfit for such a responsibility as were the sea-captains from amongst whom the first four governors were selected, officers of the army were yet more so. The previous habits and training of English regimental officers are such as to disqualify them, generally speaking, for judicial functions. But the unfitness of military men in England for this office was much greater at that period than at the present day, as they were more illiterate. The government of a colony transferred to a regimental mess-room forms indeed a humiliating contrast to the glowing periods of Commander Phillip. Mr. Therry tells us (p. 69):

“The first four governors of New South Wales, Phillip, Hunter, King, and Bligh, exercised a rule (and this includes the mess-room interregnum) which partook much of the character of the government of a large jail or penitentiary.”

Two years and a half after the disembarkation of the first batch of convicts fresh instructions arrived from the home government respecting the allotment of land. By these instructions, the advantages already enjoyed by the emancipists were extended to the privates and non-commissioned officers of the military guard on the spot, but no provision whatsoever was made for free emigrants from the mother-country. So that, when the sixth governor, Macquarie, “considered that the colony was selected as a depot for convicts; that the land properly belonged to them, as they emerged from their condition of servitude, and that emigrants were intruders on the soil,” we can only conclude that he interpreted the policy of the government at home more correctly than the more enthusiastic sailor who first presided over it. In spite of the singular incapacity displayed in the first organization of the settlement at Sydney, the following illustration of the state of law and society therein twenty years after its establishment, would be incredible if we had it on less trustworthy authority than that of Mr. Therry. He tells us (p. 74) that, during the rule of one Capt. Bligh, 1806-8, “the judge-advocate, Atkins, was a person of no professional mark, and was, besides, of a very disreputable character.” The governor reported of him to the Secretary of State that “he had been known to pronounce sentence of death when intoxicated”! With Atkins was associated a convict named Crossley, who had been transported for forging a will, and for perjury, and who had been convicted of swindling in the colony.

The result of such a state of things was as unavoidable as it was fatal. If the reformatory system in the penal colony had been as wise and efficacious as it was lamentably, nay, wickedly, the reverse, such of the convicts as yielded to the nobler motives of civil life and the claims of conscience should have been able to mix unnoticed with the sounder part of the community. Bygones should have been really bygones. The past should have been simply ignored. No allusion to it should have been tolerated. The expiated crime should have been buried out of sight and recollection, so long as there was no relapse. There should have been no such class as an emancipist class. The reformatory institution should have remained as a thing apart, sending from time to time its contingent of convalescents to be incorporated with the healthy body politic.

Instead of this, as the colony increased, the moneyed and influential [pg 761] class, the leading class, in a colony intended to reproduce the glories of England in the fifth great division of the world, consisted of emancipated convicts. No pains taken to perpetuate the memory of these people's disgrace could have attained so undesirable an object more effectually. They stood out a distinctly marked order in the state. They became landed proprietors, magistrates, high government officials, even legal functionaries. Instead of a decent veil of oblivion being thrown over their antecedents, they were, as in a Methodist experience, even ostentatiously displayed. It almost constituted a boast, and was worn as though it were a decoration of honor. When, subsequently, through the encouragement of one or two of the governors and other causes, the tide of emigration set in from the mother-country another moneyed and influential class arose of untainted reputation. A bitter rivalry between the two was the immediate consequence. The emancipists excited no sympathy or compassion for the lingering memory of a misfortune which their subsequent lives might be supposed to have retrieved, but which, instead of an obliterated brand, was ostentatiously retained as the badge of a powerful class, which became thus an object of contempt to the more respectable new-comers. The crimes for which they had been punished, and of which they should, therefore, no longer have borne the burden, reappeared as their accusers in the intercourse of social life. Society snatched up the sword which the law had in mercy laid aside; a remitted punishment was exacted in another form; and the benevolent aim of rescuing the worst class of criminals from irremediable ruin by a reformatory process, if it were ever seriously entertained, was wholly frustrated. For scarcely had the infant settlement, through the gradual influx of immigrants, begun to assume the appearance of a colony, when the original sin of its constitution appeared in the form of an evil, fatal not only to the well-being, but even to the very existence of a free community. Instead of any effort being made to heal or, at least, to alleviate this evil by some consistent line of policy, it was aggravated by the capricious preference of one or other of the rival classes by successive governors, according to their several idiosyncrasies. An evil of this nature could end only with the extinction of one or other of the antagonistic classes, or the dissolution of the colony; unless indeed the whole reformatory system were remodelled on an entirely different plan. The problem was solved by the adoption of the former alternative. The natural advantages of the country and the commercial energy of the Anglo-Saxon race proved, at last, too strong for a reformatory system which was not only crude and faulty to the utmost degree, but was literally destructive of its own end and object. After a long struggle against obstacles greater than ever before hindered the development of vast natural resources, the colony prevailed over the prison, and the entail of emancipation was finally cut off by the abolition of transportation in the year 1840.

Turn we now to the penal portion of this quite unique organization for the reformation of criminals. Here, it may be, we shall be able to trace some indications, at least, of that humane sympathy, that sorrow for a fellow-creature's fall and anxiety for his restoration, which appeals to whatever of good may be lingering in the heart of the criminal, not to mention the higher and more tender charities [pg 762] which religion inspires. No gentler instrument of cure would appear to have suggested itself to the minds of the members of the English government of 1788 than the lash!—the lash in the hands of sots and ruffians!

“I was once present in the police office in Sydney when a convict was sentenced to fifty lashes for not taking off his hat to a magistrate as he met him on the road.”

Of Capt. P. C. King, who administered the government from 1800 to 1806, Mr. Therry writes:

“He was a man of rough manners, and prone to indulge in offensive expressions borrowed from the language then in vogue in the navy.... His temper was irascible and wayward. At one time he assumed a tone of arrogant and unyielding dictation; at another, he indulged in jokes unsuited to the dignity of his position.”

Of Capt. Bligh, who succeeded King, Judge Therry tells us that his

“despotic conduct as commander of the Bounty had driven the crew to mutiny. Yet he who had proved his incapacity for ruling a small ship's company was made absolute ruler of a colony so critically circumstanced as that of New South Wales.... He was the same rude, despotic man, whether treading the quarter-deck of the Bounty or pacing his reception-room in Government House at Sydney.” “Throughout the colony,” continues the judge, “the uncontrolled use of the lash was resorted to, as an incessant and almost sole instrument of punishment, and too often those who inflicted this degrading punishment regarded themselves as irresponsible agents, and kept no record of their darkest deeds.”

But when the backs and the consciences of the unhappy victims of an English reformatory process had become alike hardened to this demoralizing torture, a perverse ingenuity had devised in Norfolk Island a place of penal torment calculated to destroy in its victims the last vestiges of humanity. To human beings thus circumstanced the scaffold became rather an object of desire than of dread. And we learn from Mr. Therry that during the years 1826, 1827, and 1830 no less than one hundred and fifty-three persons were hung out of a population of fifty thousand.

But we have not yet fathomed the lowest depth of imbecility and of guilty indifference to the commonest dictates of prudence and humanity exhibited in this nefarious scheme for the reformation, forsooth, of criminals.

Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that by the authors of the scheme, although their lips were full of the professions we have quoted, the influence of religion as an agent of reformation was simply ignored. It had not been their original intention to send out any minister at all of their religion with the expedition they had planned. It was owing to the remonstrance of a dignitary of the Established sect that one was, at the last moment, appointed. This appointment, however, does not appear to have been made with any view of bringing the influence of religion to bear on the unfortunate criminals. To them the rudest objects of self-interest appear to have been the only motives of reformation held out. Dr. Porteous—such was his name—would have displayed more than the ordinary apathy of his class as to any objects of a merely spiritual interest, and a less than ordinary keenness of perception as to its material interests, if he had allowed a large colonial expedition to leave the shores of the mother-country without any provision whatsoever being made for the celebration of the worship of the Established religion in the distant land to which it was bound. We are told by Mr. Flanagan that a priest of some Spanish ships, which [pg 763] visited the colony in 1793, “observing that a church had not yet been built, lifted up his eyes with astonishment, and declared that, had the place been settled by his nation, a house would have been erected for God before any house had been built for men” (Hist. of N. S. W., vol. 1. p. 95). In 1791 a fresh batch of convicts, two thousand and fifty in number, arrived at Sydney, making the sum total of that portion of the population two thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight. Yet, for these, for the large staff of officials, the military guard, and the few free settlers, the only minister of religion for six years after the foundation of the colony was this churchless chaplain, and the only religious influences accessible to that multitude of unfortunates was the form of Sabbatical prayer adopted by his sect. The one master cause of the inhumanity of the whole scheme was the complete and profound disregard of religious influences engendered in the minds of its authors by that embodiment of religious indifference and lifeless formalism, the established sect in England.

In few, if in any, exiled convicts have the finer sensibilities of our common nature been utterly extinguished. In nearly all, charred and unsightly as may their whole natures have become, diligent and patient labor will come at last to some unquenched fragment of the precious jewel; remote and all but lost, but waiting only for one smallest crevice to be opened through the superincumbent mass of gloom and despair, to spring in light, like a resurrection, to the surface, and fling its delivered lustre to the sun. In nearly all, he who should tenderly but perseveringly dig through the filth and refuse which a highly artificial and evilly constituted state of society has heaped upon its outcasts, would assuredly come at last to some faint trickle of the living fountain, which death only wholly dries up, ready to find its level, and even longing to be released. How many of those sad ship-loads, when the shores of their native country for ever faded from their view, succumbed to the anguish of some, were it only one, rudely riven tie, and, in the nearest feeling to despair possible out of the place of reprobation, thrilled with a heart's agony of which the severest bodily pain is but a feeble symbol! Cruel to inhumanity would be the jailer who should refuse to a prisoner in his dungeon the consolation of one ray of the light of day. But who, with the hearts of men, could have forbidden to those most miserable of their fellow-creatures an entrance to the angels of religion? Who would not have used every effort to secure their ministrations? The Catholic Church, and she alone, could have brought the light of hope within those darkened souls. She alone could have taken from despair that painful past and that ghastly present, have awakened within those hardened consciences the echoes of a nobler being, have folded around the poor outcasts her infinite charities, and enwreathed them in their embrace. She alone could have recalled them through the tears of compunction to the consciousness that they were still men, and might yet be saints; and, like the memory of childhood gliding round the frightful abyss that separated them from innocence, have beckoned, and encouraged, and helped them up the toilsome steep of penance, to the place where conquerors, who have narrowly escaped with their lives, receive their kingdoms and their crowns.

Yet was this mere tribute to the humanity of those forlorn ones wholly [pg 764] withheld from them. The rigors of penal discipline, increasing in severity with the progressive depravity of their unhappy victims, reduced them at length to a condition by comparison of which the lot of the sorriest brute that was ever becudgelled by a ruffian owner was enviable. What a depth of misery, and, worse still, what a bitter consciousness of it, is revealed in the keen reproach of one of them: “When I came here, I had the heart of a man in me, but you have plucked it out, and planted the heart of a brute in its stead!” To talk to such men of reformation could only have been a ghastly jest. Not so much as even a moral motive appears to have been suggested to them. Nothing but the unlovely object of worldly self-advantage.

Of such a system there could be but one result. No longer do we experience any surprise at finding that the aborigines, who were to have been civilized, and who, at first, evinced the most friendly disposition towards the new settlers, were shot down and even poisoned by the squatters, soldiers, emigrant adventurers, and emancipists, the standard of whose morality appears to have been about equally high; that men in the highest judicial stations were notoriously immoral; that amongst the most prosperous and respectable of Sydney tradesmen were receivers of stolen goods; that in the time of one governor,

“the marriage ceremony fell into neglect, and dissolute habits soon prevailed; rum became the regular and principal article of traffic, and was universally drunk to excess”;

and that, when he left the colony in 1800, “it was then in a state of deep demoralization” (Therry, p. 71); that, under the rule of his successor, to quote Mr. Therry's own description:

“The licentiousness that had prevailed in the time of Hunter was carried to the highest pitch. Not only was undisguised concubinage thought no shame, but the sale of wives was not an unfrequent practice. A present owner of broad acres and large herds in New South Wales is the offspring of a union strangely brought about by the purchase of a wife from her husband for four gallons of rum” (p. 72).

Lamentable as must have been the condition of a reformatory colony wherein the religious sentiment and all concern for a future life were entirely disregarded, its effects were more terrible to the Catholic portion of the convicts than to their Protestant fellow-criminals. The latter, born blind, were not sensible of the blessing of which they were deprived. To them religion was a matter of the merest unconcern. The parson was one of the gentlefolk, nothing more. He made no claim of spiritual power. It was not likely that they should invest him with it. They felt no need of him in death, any more than they had throughout their lives. Indeed, they had all along been taught that it was the special birthright of an Englishman to die as independently as he had lived. It must be owned, therefore, that, as far as they were concerned, no privation was experienced nor any practical loss occasioned by the circumstance that only one Protestant minister was appointed in the colony during six years, and for another six years only two.

How different the case of the Catholic portion of the convicts! For them to be deprived of priestly ministration was a loss all but irreparable. The clear and rigid dogmatism of the church places the three future states of existence before her children with a positiveness and reality which the mysterious power of evil may enable them to brave, but [pg 765] never to ignore. The intermediate state of temporal punishment forbids the most loaded with crimes to abandon hope, even at the moment of dissolution. But for this salvation the sacraments are ordinarily essential, of which the priests, and only the priests, are the dispensers. To deprive, thus, of priestly ministrations those poor creatures who stood most in need of them, to drag them to despair and final impenitence—the only sin from whose guilt the sacraments are powerless to rescue the sinner—was a cruelty which would have been diabolical if it had been intentional.

About ten years after the settlement of the colony, the number of Catholic convicts was greatly increased by large deportations from Ireland after the unsuccessful insurrection of 1798. But they were a very different class of men from ordinary convicts. They were superior to the ordinary political derelicts. If the most brutal and insulting tyranny that ever goaded a people to rebellion can justify an insurrection against established authorities, that justification they had to the full. Those Irish exiles of '98 were no more criminal than the ministry that arraigned them or the judges who pronounced their doom. The finer sensibilities of these men had not been blunted nor their domestic affection stifled by low associations and long habits of crime. They were, for the most part, men of blameless manners, and of a people remarkable for virtue. To such men the rude snapping asunder of the fondest heart-ties, the being dragged away for ever from the old spot of home, endeared by all blissful and innocent memories, from the familiar scenes, the beloved faces, the cherished friends, the heart-owned relatives, young and aged, from the graves of their ancestors, and the country of their birth, to be shipped off as criminals to the uttermost parts of the earth, with their country's deadly enemies for their jailers, must have been a fate from which death would have been hailed as a deliverer. To deprive those unfortunate patriots of the consolations and benedictions of their religion was indeed to make them empty the cup of sorrow to its bitterest dregs. In the year 1829, about forty years after the commencement of transportation from Ireland, they numbered nearly ten thousand souls. Yet, we are informed by Mr. Therry,

“up to that time they were dependent solely on such ministrations as could be rendered by a single priest, and for a considerable portion of that period there was no priest in the colony.”

How different would have been the organization of the expedition, how far different its results, if the church had still owned England's heart, and her statesmen had been Catholics! The most worldly and ill-living of such would not have dreamed of equipping a colony without making full provision for the celebration of Christian worship and the ministrations of the church. It would have been their first care. Had they designed to make the colony subservient to the noble object of reforming those unfortunates whom society had cast out of its pale, nothing would have been advertently left undone to bring all the salutary influences of religion to bear upon them, and to place at their service every one of its supernatural aids. What is the church, in her actual working in the affairs of men, but a divinely organized reformatory system? Now a fundamental principle of that system is that forgiven crime is buried out of sight and out of mind. When the minister of the divine pardon [pg 766] has opened the doors of the eternal prison, and has stricken off the deadly fetters from the self-condemning penitent, he who was just now kneeling at his side in bonds and death, together with all the crimes he has committed, are alike forgotten by him. He is to him quite a new and other man. And with the Christian benediction he sends him forth reinvested with the royalty of his birth and his consanguinity to God, to mingle, mayhap, if he correspond to the grace given, with the most virtuous on the earth, as though he had never broken its peace or given scandal to his brethren. Men are what their religion makes them. And no Catholic statesman would have sent out a convict colony to a distant shore without providing for such as would be reformed a destination where the past might be at once forgotten and repaired. The angels of the Gospel, inflamed with the noblest charity that ever dawned over the everlasting hills on an ice-bound world, would have been scarcely ever absent from the prison cells, never weary of importuning their inmates to save themselves, and to reclaim their place amongst their fellows by a reformation which would at the same time restore them to their hopes as immortal men. Far from permitting to them every license of lust, and the indulgence of every criminal passion which did not interfere with jail discipline; by their moral reformation, and by it alone, would they have attempted their reformation as citizens. They would have been ever at hand to aid them with priestly counsels and the supernatural grace of the sacraments in those frequent falls and relapses of which nearly every history of reformation consists. And those who were sufficiently reformed to be able to conform thenceforth to the easy standard of public virtue would have found, in the new career to which they were committed, precisely the same divine system, with its supernatural aids and exhaustless charities ready to carry on in their behalf the work of restoration, through the love of man, to the reward of God.

Even in the case of those pitiable beings, in whose crime-clogged souls the loving accents of religion appeared to awake no echoes, never would the indiscriminating and wholesale torture of the lash have been summoned to its unholy and brutalizing work to deepen still more their moral degradation and place their reformation for ever out of hope. Restrained as they were from doing further mischief to society, the church, whose heart, as of a human mother, yearns with most fondness towards the most vicious of her children, would never have abandoned, still less have ill-treated, the poor outcasts. She would have hoped against hope. Nor would she for one moment have ceased her importunities, her ministrations, and her prayers, until final impenitence had taken away the unhappy beings for ever from the counsels of mercy, or human obduracy had capitulated, at the hour of death, to the exhaustless love of God.

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