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.”