Transportation to New South Wales came to its end none too soon: in fifty years, 75,000 convicts had been transported to that colony, and 30,000 to the little island of Tasmania in twenty years.
Were there no other argument for the discountenance of transportation, it would be almost enough to say that the life in the convict-ship itself makes the reformation of transported criminals impossible. Where many bad men are brought together, the few not wholly corrupt who may be among them have no opportunity for speech, and the grain of good that may exist in every heart can have no chance for life; if not inclination, pride at least leads the old hand to put down all acts that are not vile, all words that are not obscene. Those who have sailed in convict company say that there is something terrible in the fiendish delight that the “old hands” take in watching the steady degradation of the “new chums.” The hardened criminals invariably meet the less vile with outrage, ridicule, and contempt, and the better men soon succumb to ruffians who have crime for their profession, and for all their relaxation vice.
To describe the horrors of the convict-ships, we are told, would be impossible. The imagination will scarce suffice to call up dreams so hideous. Four months of filthiness in a floating hell sink even the least bad to the level of unteachable brutality. Mutiny is unknown; the convicts are their own masters and the ship‘s, but the shrewd callousness of the old jail-bird teaches all that there is nothing to be gained even by momentary success. Rage and violence are seldom seen, but there is a humor that is worse than blows,—conversation that transcends all crime in infamy.
It will be long before the last traces of convict disease disappear from Tasmania and New South Wales; the gold-find has done much to purify the air, free selection may lead to a still more bright advance, manufacturing may lend its help; but years must go by before Tasmania can be prosperous or Sydney moral. Their history is not only valuable as a guide to those who have to save West Australia, as General Bourke and Mr. Wentworth saved New South Wales, but as an example, not picked from ancient rolls, but from the records of a system founded within the memory of living man, and still existent, of what transportation must necessarily be, and what it may easily become.
The results of a dispassionate survey of the transportation system are far from satisfactory. If deportation be considered as a punishment, it would be hard to find a worse. Punishment should be equable, reformatory, deterrent, cheap. Transportation is the most costly of all the punishments that are known to us; it is subject to variations that cannot be guarded against; it is severest to the least guilty and slightest to the most hardened; it morally destroys those who have some good remaining in them; it leaves the ruffianly malefactor worse if possible than it finds him; and, while it is frightfully cruel and vindictive in its character, it is useless as a deterrent because its nature is unknown at home. Transportation to the English thief means exile, and nothing more; it is only after conviction, when far away from his uncaught associates, that he comes to find it worse than death. Instead of deterring, transportation tempts to crime; instead of reforming, it debases the bad, and confirms in villainy the already infamous. To every bad man it gives the worst companions; the infamous are to be reformed by association with the vile; while its effects upon the colonies are described in every petition of the settlers, and testified to by the whole history of our plantations in the antipodes, and by the present condition of West Australia and Tasmania, from which, however, New South Wales has happily escaped. We have come at last to transportation in its most limited and restricted sense; the only remaining step is to be quit of it altogether.
In conjunction with all punishment, we should secure some means of separating the men one from another as soon as the actual punishment is terminated: to settle them on land, to settle them with wives where possible, should be our object. The work which really has in it something of reformation is that which a man has to do, not in order that he may avoid whipping, but that he may escape starvation; and it is from this point of view that transportation is defensible. A man, however bad, will generally become a useful member of society and a not altogether neglectful father if allowed to settle upon land away from his old associates; but morbid tendencies of every kind are strengthened by close association with others who are laboring under a like infirmity: and where the former convicts are allowed to hang together in towns, nothing is to be expected better than that which is actually found—namely, a state of society where wives speedily become as villainous as their husbands, and where children are brought up to emulate their fathers’ crimes.
To keep the men separate from each other, after the expiration of the sentence, we need to send the convicts to a fairly populous country, whence arises this great difficulty: if we send convicts to a populous colony, we are met at once by a cry that we are forcing the workmen of the colony into a one-sided competition; that we are offering an unbearable insult to the free population; that, in attempting to reform the felon, in allowing him to be absorbed into the colonial society, we are degrading and corrupting the whole community on the chance of possible benefit to our English villain. On the other hand, if we send our convicts to an uninhabited land, such as New South Wales and Tasmania were, such as West Australia is now, we build up an artificial Pandemonium, whither we convey at the public cost the pick and cream of the ruffians of the world, to form a community of which each member must be sufficiently vile of himself to corrupt a nation.
If by care the difficulty of which I have spoken can be avoided, transportation might be replaced by short sentences and solitary confinement, and low diet, to be followed by forced exile, under regulations, to some selected colony, say the Ghauts of Eastern Africa, opposite to Madagascar, or the highlands that skirt the Zambesi River. Exile after punishment may often be the only way of providing for convicts who would otherwise be forced to return to their former ways. The difficulties in the way of discharged convicts seeking employment are too terrible for them not to accept joyfully any simple plan for emigration to a country where they are unknown.
In Western Australia, transportation has not been made subservient to colonization, and both in consequence have failed.
On going on board the Bombay at King George‘s Sound, I at once found myself in the East. The captain‘s crew of Malays, the native cooks in long white gowns, the Bombay serangs in dark-blue turbans, red cummerbunds, and green or yellow trowsers; the negro or Abyssinian stokers, and passengers in coats of China-grass; the Hindoo deck-sweepers playing on their tomtoms in the intervals of work; the punkahs below; the Hindostanee names for every one on deck; and, above all, the general indolence of everybody, all told of a new world.