caused by the composition of the society. The mass of the community were slaves—slaves without the contented spirit of negroes or Russian serfs, for they had been born in a free country, and could not learn to submit and be happy, even if, in the matter of food and lodging, they had been well provided, instead of being burned with heat, perished with cold, and always half starved. They were slaves, too, labouring hard, but scarcely producing anything.
The long voyage was a bad preparation for useful labour. The convicts were heaped on board ship without selection, the vilest and most venial criminals chained together. No classification of degrees of crime, or for the purposes of useful labour, was attempted. The overseers were prisoners selected by favouritism, or for their bodily strength; and the work was divided between personal service on the officers, handicraft, and mere drudgery.
One chaplain of the Church of England enjoyed a salary for preaching occasionally to an ignorant uninstructed multitude, of whom one-third were Irish Roman Catholics, transported for political or agrarian offences. Religious teaching, the bedside prayer, the solemn call to repentance, were seldom heard in that miserable Gomorrah. Far from all civilising, humanising influences, in such society the finest natures became brutalised into tyrants, while the criminals under their command dragged on a miserable existence or rebelled with all the dogged ruffianism of despair. Although the chief records of the early days of the colony are drawn from the writings and reports of officials, who were naturally inclined to put the best face on a system of which they were the paid instruments, and whose eyes, ears, consciences were seared by constant contact with misery and tyranny, yet there is more than enough testimony of the cruel and stupid despotism which prevailed.
We learn from the journals of Howard, and the reports of the parliamentary inquiries instituted through his influence, how frightful were the abuses practised on tried and untried prisoners at the close of the eighteenth century in England, where the gaols were visited by numerous individuals of various ranks, where the common-law rights of the subject had been established, where what was considered in those clays a free press flourished, where, from Sabbath to Sabbath, Christian ministers assembled and led Christian congregations to prayer and praise, where a parliament held its sittings whose orators made Europe resound with their denunciations of tyranny, and where laws were administered by incorruptible, independent judges. We may more easily imagine how in New South Wales, where there was no law but
