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.