"I am sorry there are no more of them," answered Captain M----; "but at all events they will give you time to learn other contrivances. I know not well, indeed, how you procure food, for I suppose you do not live altogether on the produce of the lake."
"I do not propose to do so," said Dudley, "for in some seasons I believe it would afford me no supply; but I must have recourse to the old primeval means--the bow and arrows, and the snare," he added, with a smile.
Captain M---- looked for a moment or two at the fine double-barrelled gun which lay beside him, before he answered; but then, raising his eyes with a frank, kind expression, he said, "Perhaps I am doing wrong, but I cannot make up my mind to leave you altogether dependent upon such very precarious means of support. I have said I believe you innocent; let me add, I feel sure you are a man of honour also, and if you will promise me never to use what I am going to give against human life, except in your own defence, and especially not against any one sent to take you, in case such a thing should ever occur, I will leave you this gun, and supply you with ammunition. You will then be in a condition always to procure food at least."
The promise he required was readily made; and Dudley said little more, for the feeling of gratitude he experienced was overpowering. He sat with his head leaning on his hand, buried in meditation; and who can trace the wild range of his thoughts during the few minutes which he thus remained silent. His companion saw that his kindness had plunged him into that sort of gloom which is often produced by feelings the most noble and the most tender, when they stand strongly contrasted with some dark and irremediable point in the fate of those who experience them; and in order rather to rouse him from his reverie than anything else, he said, "I suppose you are well accustomed to the use of a gun."
"I will show you," answered Dudley, who was certainly one of the most skilful marksmen of his day. "Let us walk down the hill; we shall doubtless find some game; and if you will permit me, I will prove that you do not place your gun in inexpert hands."
"Willingly," replied Captain M----, rising from the ground where he had been seated. "I am sorry I have not more powder and shot with me; but I will leave upon the spot where our little party is encamped all that we have, except a few charges, which may be necessary as we go down towards the sea-shore. If you are provident it will serve you for some time; and ere long, depend upon it, a population will grow up around you from whom you will be able to obtain fresh supplies. This country must be destined to be much more thickly populated very soon. The human race is advancing in every direction, and the progress already made is marvellous."
"That is the most frightful consideration of all the many which present themselves to the mind in contemplating the present state of the neighbouring colony," replied Dudley. "When one thinks of its rapid progress, and of the multitudes springing up here like a crop of grain, and remembers that almost every seed is diseased, that the moral condition of almost every human being is either tainted at his arrival, or destined soon to be tainted by the contaminating influences to which he is exposed, what can we look forward to in the future but a perfect hell upon earth? Can we expect that, without efficient guidance, with few means of religious instruction, with no moral restraints and no correcting principle but the fear of corporeal punishment, destitute of even habitual reverence for probity, crowded together in places where virtue, and honour, and honesty, are a scoff and a reproach, where the highest distinction is excess in vice or skill in crime, can we expect that any man who may become a father will breed his child up in the way that he should go, and will not rather infect him with his own vices, to be fostered and matured by others, equally, if not more, conversant with crime? It is a known fact, sir, that in the neighbouring colony of Van Dieman's Land the free emigrant of the lower class is looked upon with more doubt and suspicion even than the convict, and is, nine times out of ten, as base and degraded. What must a colony become thus constituted? and what is the awful responsibility upon a nation which, possessing a large, I might say an immense, extent of fertile and beautiful country, plants in it, as the germ of future nations, all that is wretched, abominable, and depraved of the mother country; denies the wretched men that it sends out the means of amelioration, and by every law and ordinance insures that the pestilence shall be propagated from man to man, till none but those who are placed above temptation by superior fortune or superior culture remains unaffected by moral disease more frightful than any plague which ever ravaged the world?"
"But how can this be amended?" asked Captain M----. "What are the means?"
"They require deep consideration," replied Dudley. "It is the actual state of things which first strikes us; the remedies may be long in seeking. This is more especially the case when a particular system has long been going on, and every attempt at partial reform has but added evil to evil, till at length the whole has become intolerable. The natural process is easily described; and it is only by historically viewing the question that we can see how such monstrous abominations have arisen. These things are not done as a whole: it is step by step that they are performed. If man sat down calmly to consider what was best to be done under particular circumstances, if he meditated philosophically upon the object which he proposed to attain, and endeavoured to foresee, as far as the shortness of the human view will permit, the results of all that he attempts for temporary purposes, he might frame, and would frame, if not a perfect system, at least one, the defects in which would be comparatively few, and easily remedied; but what has been usually his course? He has considered the temporary purpose alone, and that not philosophically. In the first institution of transportation, his object seemed to be twofold: to punish guilty persons, and to deliver their country from their presence. Simple exile was the simplest form in which this could be achieved; the next was the selling of the convict for a slave; then came the transportation to a colony of the mother country, with a prohibition against return: otherwise the peopling of a colony with the vicious and the criminal; then punishment in the colony was added to mere transportation; and in all and every one of these steps, nothing was held in view but infliction on the culprit--relief to his native land. Reformation was never thought of, degradation was never guarded against; the moral condition of the convict, or his religious improvement, was never taken into consideration; nor did the mind of man seem to reach, till within the last few years, the comprehension of that essential point in the whole question, that where the convict was going he was to become the member of a vast community, the state and condition of which would for years be strictly connected with that of the country which expelled him. None of these things were ever thought of, and still less the high and imperative duty which binds legislators to attempt, in punishing, to reclaim; a duty not only to their country and to their fellow men, but to their God."
Captain M---- seemed to ponder over his companion's words for a few moments, and then replied. "I doubt not that what you say is true. The evils you speak of have arisen, in a great part, from the want of a due comprehension and consideration of the objects to be obtained; but were that all, the evils of the system existing would be speedily remedied; but I fear there is another great error which statesmen have fallen into, and which will ever, as long as it is persisted in, throw insuperable obstacles in the way of reform. The error I allude to is a belief that corporeal punishment will reclaim. I am convinced that its only tendency is to degrade and render more vicious the person on whom it is inflicted. That it must exist I do not deny, for the probability of incurring it must be held up before the convict's view, to deter him from adding fresh crimes to those which have gone before; but the principal means I would employ would be entirely moral means: encouragement to a right course, exhortation, instruction, and the chance of recovering gradually that sense of moral dignity, the want of which is a source of all evil."