The Brooklet.
From The German Of Goethe.
O brooklet silver bright and gay!
For ever rushing on thy way,
I, lingering, ever ask thee whence
Thou comest here, where goest thou hence?
“From the dark rock's deep breast I come,
O'er flow'rs and moss I toss and roam;
While on my bosom smiles and lies
The hovering vision of the skies.
“Ask not of me, a laughing child,
Whither or whence my foot steps wild;
Him do I trust to guide me on
Who called me from the senseless stone.”
The Colonization Of New South Wales By Great Britain.[155]
Some few years ago it became known that the government of Great Britain were thinking of renewing the experiment of transporting convicts to Australia with the object of affording them a chance of reformation. This time, however, it was its western shore which was to be tried, and that, too, on a scale not inferior in magnitude to that on which the attempt had been so unsuccessfully made in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. The bare suggestion of such a proposal sufficed to kindle a flame of indignation throughout the whole Australian continent—for such must an island be called which is as large as Europe. To judge from a letter which we shall have occasion to quote further on, the system as pursued in Eastern Australia, although upon so insignificant a scale, is fraught with evils similar to those which so signally characterized its more important precursor in the west. Yet were the eastern colonists, or an influential and active portion of them, ready to risk the reproduction of the baneful curse which for nearly half a century blighted the prosperity and checked the growth of their western rivals, and from the consequences of which the latter are suffering to this day. So bitter, however, was the remembrance of this system amongst the western colonists, so keen their sense of the dire mischiefs still resulting from its action, that they went the length of avowing their fixed determination to separate from the mother-country, if the experiment were attempted, although some thousands of miles intervened between them and the spot where the experiment was proposed to be renewed.
What were the causes of a failure so disastrous? The objects proposed in the original undertaking were of the noblest. To colonize a newly-discovered country of great extent and promise, to develop its resources, and to bring it under the sway of a benign and noble civilization, was a worthy object of ambition. To unite with this a scheme for the reformation of criminals, in a land where they would be entirely removed from old associations, where they might enter upon a new career without being ever dogged by the spectre of the past, was a great and beneficent design. How was it that the proposed reformatory became a horrible curse alike to the convicts and the colony, and that no prospect of progress in any form could be reasonably entertained until the original scheme was utterly swept away, and the local administration taken altogether out of the hands of the home government, and placed upon its present independent footing?
The question of the reformation of criminals is not only of pressing importance, but one that appeals to [pg 651] our higher feelings; and it has of late become a subject of special investigation to the somewhat interested philanthropy and eminently shallow psychology of the day. It is impossible to say that any solution of the question was seriously attempted in the original transportation project to Botany Bay. It was the one object, nevertheless, which assumed a prominent place in the experiment; and to the history of its failure we propose to devote our chief attention. The colonization of the country was distinctly announced as forming part of the scheme; nor, indeed, is it easy to see how it could very well have been dissociated from it. On this subject, therefore, we will offer a few remarks by way of introduction.
The recolonization of Southern Europe by the Northern tribes in the Vth and VIth centuries of the present era offers a striking contrast to the colonization of Australia by a nation calling itself Christian. Anything but prepossessing is the description given us by the historians of those Northern invaders, whose deeds but too faithfully bear out the description. Over depopulated provinces, cities in ashes, and the ruins of the noblest monuments of religion and art, they swarmed into their new settlements. Vandals, Franks, Goths, and Huns, all alike were distinguished for an unpitying cruelty, although the Huns surpassed the rest in licentious profligacy and crime. Yet amidst the ruin they had made, and the prodigious havoc with which they had desolated the fairest countries of Europe, the winning accents of Christian civilization stole into their ears and subdued their untutored souls. In one respect they had the advantage of the first English settlers in Australia. They had not been flung out of their own country like garbage. They came under no ban of law. They bore not with them the consciences of convicted criminals. They marched to the spoil under the (to them) legitimate banners of ambition, or to satisfy their greed of gain. The untutored instincts of humanity, grand even in their lawlessness and ferocity, urged them on. Deformed, as might have been expected, with many of the gross vices of the savage, they were not wanting in some of the more attractive features of the nobility of nature. Their ears had never listened to the loving voice of the Virgin Daughter of Sion. Their hearts had never been disciplined nor their minds formed by the revelation from heaven committed to her keeping. Theirs was not the guilt, as it has been of some of the nations of this XIXth century, to have apostatized to the barbarous maxim that “might makes right.” They knew no better. No sooner, however, did the majestic vision of the Spouse of Christ—the Catholic Church—meet their gaze, than, far from treating her with insult and outrage, they threw themselves with loving veneration at her feet, bowed their necks with the truthful docility of children to her discipline, and arose to prove themselves her most faithful defenders.
But whilst the men-eating aborigines of Australia had no civilization to communicate, the first invaders of its shores from Great Britain were, some of them, of the worst class of barbarians—the barbarians of civilization. They were of those whose untamable souls law, civilization, and religion had failed to subdue. They were the offscouring of the criminal class of the three kingdoms. The society they had outraged had cast them out from itself upon the coasts of Australia. They stepped on shore [pg 652] convicted as felons. They had forfeited the citizenship of their own country; and, although still undergoing their respective sentences, it was understood that they were to have the opportunity of making a fresh start in their new country, should their conduct correspond with the clemency of the executive. On a career that, more than any other, requires a spirit of enterprise, light-heartedness, and courage, they had set out under the ban of expatriation, the burden of shame, and all the depressing influences of detected guilt. Of such were the first settlers of Australia.
On the evening of the 26th of January, 1788, the English dominion over what has been called the fifth division of the globe was inaugurated by the solemnity of pledging the king's health round a flag-pole. His majesty's subjects in New Holland, at the period of this imposing function, numbered one thousand and thirty souls. Of these seven hundred and seventy-eight were convicts. The remaining two hundred and fifty consisted of the soldiers who formed the garrison of the new settlement, and their officers, together with a few civil functionaries. In this rude germ of future commonwealths the elements neither of agriculture nor of commerce as yet existed. An encampment of huts was its first abiding-place. For food it depended on the stores brought with it from the mother-country; amongst which was neither seed nor other provision for future crops. At the moment at which we write, after a lapse of eighty-six years, the flocks and herds of a wealthy agricultural population range over an area as large as that of Europe; five splendid provinces, each with its own court and parliament, can boast of cities equal in size to many European capitals, and constituting commercial marts second to none on the face of the globe.
Of the prodigious strides they have made in material prosperity, Mr. Therry, in his interesting Reminiscences, gives the following striking illustration:
“It has been ascertained that our South Pacific colonies take from us in imports for every man, woman, and child of their respective populations, on the average, from £8 to £10 per head per annum, while the United States were only customers to us in 1859 (before the war began), at the rate of 17s. per head. The amount of imports received by Canada, which comes nearest to Australia, is £5 per head; that of New South Wales alone is £21 3s. 4d. per head; of Victoria, £25” (p. 9).
The commerce of these colonies with all parts of the world is nearly three times larger in money value than was the whole export commerce of England less than a century ago; and they receive from the United Kingdom upwards of twenty times the value of exports which the North American colonies were receiving at the time of their separation from the mother-country. To crown the social edifice, a contented people live and prosper under the shadow of the freest institutions, in many respects surpassing, in this particular, the much-vaunted model on which they have been framed.
It is certain that the prevailing motive of the English government in despatching a penal colony to Botany Bay was to supply the place of her lost American colonies. No doubt the idea of colonizing the country was present to their minds. But it never went beyond words. Not a single provision was made for colonial development. On the contrary, the whole constitution of the exiled community was fatal to such an object. For nearly half a century the inherent vices of the system struggled against and forcibly restrained any [pg 653] efforts to profit by the advantages of a country of such wonderful promise; nor was it before the original government scheme had been quite abandoned that the colony rose from its inaction, like an unfettered giant, and, as it were, almost at a stride, arrived at a pitch of prosperity unexampled, in so short a period of time, in the annals of the world, with the single exception of the American colonies after they had disembarrassed themselves of the yoke of the mother country.
The defection of those colonies had stopped an important outlet for the criminal population of the three kingdoms. We are told by Bancroft, in his History of the United States, that
“The prisoners condemned [in England] to transportation were a salable commodity. Such was the demand for labor in America that convicts and laborers were regularly purchased and shipped to the colonies, where they were sold as indented servants.”
The Irish malcontents, moreover—of whom, owing to the long misgovernment of the kingdom, Ireland was full, and whose disaffection had been stimulated by the revolt of the North American colonies—threatened to increase the convict population by a large and particularly unmanageable element. It was only a year or two before that a country happened to be explored and taken possession of in the name of England so happily fitted for colonization, and of which such admirable use has since been made. The discovery was the result of sheer accident, so far as the British government was concerned. The expedition to which it owes it was sent out by the Royal Society for scientific purposes; the object being to make accurate observations of the transit of Venus from the island of Otaheite. The islands of New Zealand and the east coast of New Holland were explored on the way home. The astronomical expedition returned to England in the midsummer of 1771.
In 1786, the government decided on establishing permanent settlements on the coast lately explored by Captain Cook, accompanied by Messrs. Green and Banks and Dr. Solander. The colony consisted exclusively of the convicts and the military in charge; of prisoners and their jailers. Any class out of which a free civil community might be formed could only arise out of chance settlers, or of those among the convicts whose position was the result rather of untoward circumstances than of any irreclaimable criminality of disposition, and who were prepared to re-commence in those distant lands a career from which their misfortune or their fault had shut them out at home.
The constitution of the expedition was as follows: A governor, lieutenant-governor, judge-advocate, commissary, and chaplain; a surgeon and two assistant surgeons; an agent for the transports; two hundred and twelve soldiers and mariners, including officers; their wives, numbering forty, and their children; five hundred and forty-eight male convicts, and two hundred and thirty female.
The neighborhood of Botany Bay having been judged unsuitable for the new settlement, the expedition landed at a spot situated at the head of one of the coves of Port Jackson Harbor, which had been judiciously selected by the governor as the site of the future capital. The 26th of January, 1788, was the day of disembarkation, and it was on the evening of that day that the inaugural rite, to which we have before alluded, was solemnized. After a lapse of eleven days, consumed in putting up the [pg 654] public and private structures needful for the new colony, the ceremony of inauguration was supplemented by one of a yet more imposing character. On the seventh of February was held a formal assembly of all the members of the new commonwealth. An occasion of greater interest could not be imagined. Upon no band of colonists was ever lavished a greater wealth of hope and fortune. No guilt of diplomatic fraud or commercial overreaching marred their title to the new territory. Through no bloodshed, no violence, but quite unopposed, they had entered on its peaceable possession. No foreign power, to whom the new state might be calculated to give umbrage, threatened its future welfare. A magnificent harbor sheltered its ships and transports; and it was only one of many such with which a coast of vast extent was indented. A whole continent of virgin soil stretched out before them, which, under the influence of the finest climate under heaven, waited only the bidding of man to quicken within itself an exhaustless luxuriance of vegetable life. A mighty Empire of the South offered itself to any hands that were willing and able to grasp it. It was only reasonable to expect that England, having just lost her supremacy in the New World, would have devoted her utmost resources of civilization and statesmanship to laying deep and wide the foundations of her new dominion. If none of the members of an aristocracy enjoying more advantages and more power than were ever possessed by the most privileged class of any the most privileged nation, were willing to leave the home of their ancestral traditions, the softness of hereditary ease, and an absolute independence of fortune's caprice, in order to join in the struggling life of a young community, we should at least have expected that the mother-country would despatch a contribution from each of the other classes of her citizens to assist in the formation of the new settlement. Her system of jurisprudence, admirable in spite of the inextricable jumble of statutes and precedents amidst which it has been reared, would be represented, one would have thought, by a sufficient number of lawyers of character; her merchant princes would be encouraged to carry their spirit of enterprise to so rich and promising a field; still more, that which forms the only true and solid basis of material prosperity—agriculture—would be abundantly cared for in the shape of a due supply of competent masters and sturdy laborers; last, though not least, some provision would be made, not only for the moral and religious training of the people, but for such mental cultivation as was compatible with the condition of an infant community. What no one in his senses could have anticipated was that the government of a great and ancient nation should have sent out as the founders of a new colonial empire a contingent of malefactors, guarded by a few marines. Upon the occasion of the formal inauguration ceremony the whole colony were assembled around the governor. Nearest to himself were the lieutenant-governor, the judge-advocate, provost-marshal, commissary, adjutant, doctor, and chaplain. The two hundred and twelve marines, including no less than fifteen commissioned officers, were drawn up in battle array. Apart from the rest, as under the ban of crime, stood the bulk of the community—namely, the convicts. To this assemblage the judge-advocate read the royal commission and the act of Parliament which constituted the court of judicature. After the reading of which documents the one hundred [pg 655] and ninety-seven marines shouldered old “Brown Bess,” made ready, presented, and fired three times.
The ceremony was not imposing, but it was on a par with the rest of the proceedings. The governor, Capt. Phillip, wound it up with a speech in which, in spite of grammatical errors which may be pardoned in a sailor, he displayed considerable ability and eloquence, but a marvellous absence of common sense. In the course of a somewhat inflated panegyric on England and her fortunes, his excellency went on to portray his native country as the peculiar favorite of heaven, and to ascribe her successful colonization of New Holland—a matter considered by anticipation as already accomplished, and that, too, in the teeth of the recent defection of her most splendid colonies on the plea of tyrannical misgovernment—to a prolonged special intervention of Divine Providence.
“Nor did our good genius desert us,”continued the governor, “when we reached our destination. On the contrary, it was then that her(?) crowning favor was bestowed. Witness the magnificent harbor which before us extends its hundred beautiful bays. Witness the beautiful landscape, the islands, capes, and headlands, covered with waving foliage, rich and varied beyond compare. Witness every surrounding object which, as regards a situation for our future homes, our necessities could demand or our tastes desire. Happy the nation whose enterprises are thus favored by the elements and by fortune! Happy the men engaged in an enterprise so favored! Happy the state to whose founding such propitious omens are granted!”
It is clear from the following passage, incredible as it may appear, that the government of the day did really contemplate founding a new state beyond the seas out of the criminal population, the moral refuse of society. Gov. Phillip even challenges for the scheme the praise of magnanimity.
“The American colonies,” he said in his inaugural address, “smarting under what they considered a sense of injustice, had recourse to the sword, and the ancient state and the young dependency met in deadly conflict. The victory belonged to the American people, and Britain, resigning the North America continent (?) to the dominion of her full-grown offspring, magnanimously seeks in other parts of the earth a region where she may lay the foundations of another colonial empire, which one day will rival in strength, but we hope not in disobedience, that which she has so recently lost” (Flanagan, vol. i. p. 30).
It is, however, remarkable that Mr. Flanagan grounds his own attribution of magnanimity on the absence of those very features of the new territory on whose conspicuous presence the governor, standing on the spot, congratulates his fellow-colonists, as one of the signs of a special interposition of Providence in their favor.
“To incur vast expense,” writes the author of the History of New South Wales, “encounter great dangers, and overcome great difficulties, in order to possess and colonize a country more remote than any hitherto brought under subjection by Europeans—a country presenting no pre-eminent attractions in soil, destitute, so far as was then known, of the precious metals, and inhabited by a people in the greatest degree barbarous and devoid of all riches—while countries possessing all those attractions which New Holland wanted were within her reach, is the best evidence which can possibly be afforded of national magnanimity” (Flanagan, vol. i. p. 2).
“How grand is the prospect which lies before the youthful nation!” exclaimed the enthusiastic governor to the new colony in his inaugurative speech. “Enough of honor for any state would it be to occupy the first position, both in regard to time and influence, in a country so vast, so beautiful, so fertile, so blessed in climate, so rich in all those bounties [pg 656]which nature can confer; ... its fertile plains tempting only the slightest labor of the husbandman to produce in abundance the fairest and the richest fruits; its interminable pastures, the future home of flocks and herds innumerable; its mineral wealth, already known to be so great as to promise that it may yet rival those treasures which fiction loves to describe—enough for any nation, I say, would it be to enjoy those honors and those advantages; but others not less advantageous, but perhaps more honorable, await the people of the state of which we are the founders.”
“To these,” continued the governor, addressing that engaging instalment of British civilization which the imperial government had sent forth from the shores of their country to take possession, in its name, of this new land, and develop its abundant resources, “will belong the surpassing honor of having introduced permanently the Christian religion and European civilization into the southern hemisphere. At no distant date it will be theirs to plant the standard of the cross and the ensign of their country in the centre of numerous populous nations to whom both these have hitherto been but little known. Such are the objects which will arouse the enterprise and stimulate the energies of the people of this young country—enterprise and energy, directed not toward conquest or rapine, chiefly because Australia, rich beyond measure in her own possessions, cannot desire those of others, but towards the extension of commerce, the spread of the English language, the promotion of the arts and sciences, and the extension of the true faith. Such are the circumstances and conditions which lead to the conviction that this state, of which to-day we lay the foundation, will, ere many generations have passed away, become the centre of the southern hemisphere—the brightest gem of the Southern Ocean” (Flanagan, vol. i. pp. 32, 33).
Were these, then, whom Capt. Phillip addressed the men to introduce the Christian religion and European civilization in a newly-discovered continent? Were a detachment of jail-birds and their keepers to “develop commerce, spread the English language, promote the arts and sciences, and extend the true faith?” Were such as these the missionaries to plant the standard of the cross, or even that of their own country, amidst populations alien to both alike? Did the English government seriously propose to make a missionary college out of a reformatory, if such it could be called? Were the Barabbases of England to be the pioneers of civilization, the Artful Dodgers of the metropolis the heralds of the Christian faith?
The truth is that the only object directly provided for by the government to which England was indebted for this “magnanimous” deed of colonization was the establishment of a secure and distant depot for the worst criminals of the country.
The noble object to which the exhaustless resources of the continent they had just taken possession of were to be devoted was left to the chapter of accidents. A picture of the future greatness of the equivocal colony was, it is true, dashed off, in glowing colors, by Commodore Phillip, but no provision of any kind was made for its realization.
There was nothing whatever to hinder the attainment of both these objects, or at least an attempt to attain them. On the contrary, never was a fairer opportunity for an experiment of the kind offered to a people. Before them lay the wide, almost limitless landscape in all its exuberant beauty and unexhausted fertility. There it lay, as a kind of treasure-trove, at their feet, with no one to dispute its possession. Their [pg 657] first object ought assuredly to have been to bring a large portion of the soil under cultivation; agriculture being that on which more than on anything else the prosperity of a country, and especially of a young country, depends. Not one shilling did these original and eccentric colonists invest in the soil of that vast island continent, every acre of which was theirs, with all its latent wealth, whether that wealth consisted in its as yet untried productive powers, or in the hoard of precious metals which might be locked up in its secret depths.
The home government thus had it in their power to offer to a superior class of yeomen inducements of the most persuasive kind to try their fortunes in the new colony. Sufficient area being left for the development of a splendid capital, they should have been planted in middling-sized farms as closely around the reserved area as seemed desirable, and stretching out into the continent in gradually-encroaching circles. A small contingent of married men, of good reputation amongst their neighbors, and of superior capacity and attainments, should have been encouraged to throw their fortunes into the colony. To these a greater extent of land should have been granted. These settlers would have formed the nucleus of a class from which could have been selected men fitted for holding the most responsible positions. The young colony could very well dispense with hereditary titles of honor. But it could not so well dispense with a class such as we refer to, if it was to become a country to which men of character and position would not hesitate to resort. A class was wanted other than the emancipists—the very worst that could have been chosen—to supply persons of standing, acquirements, and, above all, of reputable experience for the magistracy, and for other national, so to speak, as well as local, offices of trust and administration. Such a class of yeomen having been thus provided, the staff of government officials, the military and naval forces, and the continually increasing influx of convict laborers, added to the population of those classes themselves, would have supplied a considerable population, ready to hand, of customers and consumers. The mercantile and professional classes would soon have sent their contributions from the overstocked mother-country, not in arrear, at all events, of the ordinary course of supply and demand. A manufacturing class would have developed of itself quite as soon as the interests of the colony required it. And, lastly and most imperatively of all, had the mother-country been Catholic, the interests of religion would have been the very first consideration. Priests and a nucleus of one or more religious orders would have been despatched with the expedition. Churches would have been the first structures raised. Land would have been set apart for their support, and for the appropriate splendor of Christian worship. And hospitals, attended by religious of both sexes, would have been erected, and endowed with sufficient land for their perpetual support.
Nothing of the sort was so much as attempted. Thirty years after the memorable inauguration day, a period of time embracing nearly one-half of the entire age of the colony, the then governor, Macquarie, we are told by Mr. Therry, “considered 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.” Ten years afterwards, little more [pg 658] than seventy years ago, the state of “the brightest gem of the Southern Ocean,” in spite of the encouragement given to emigration by Macquarie's successor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, during the three years of his administration, is thus described by the very competent authority just quoted: “The majority of the community he (Sir Thomas Brisbane) ruled over were of the convict class, who were not respectable nor right-minded. It consisted of very inflammable materials, composing two-thirds of the whole community, which it required the exercise of a stern authority to repress.”
Natural advantages have triumphed over the obstacles offered by human folly. The present condition of the Australian colonies more than realizes the glowing expectations of the head-jailer of the first convict gang that landed on their shores. Indeed, if those utterances of Commander Phillip were to be judged by the results, we might be tempted to ascribe them to the inspiration of even prophetical sagacity. One merit, at all events, may be accorded to the enthusiastic sailor. He did not overestimate the boundless resources and advantageous position of the noble country of which he and his prisoners were assuming the proprietorship “on behalf of the British people,” utterly incapable as they were of taking advantage of them.
To Be Concluded Next Month.