beguile itself with the belief that the transportation system was a benefit to the transported as well as to those among whom they were sent. But the colonists very soon began to complain. The convicts who had spent their period of probation in hulks or prisons generally left those homes of horror with natures so brutalised as to make their intrusion into any community of decent persons an insufferable nuisance. Pent up in penal settlements by themselves, the convicts turned into demons; drafted into an inhabited colony, they were too numerous to be wholly absorbed by the population, and they carried their contagion along with them. New South Wales began to protest against their presence. Lord John Russell, when Secretary for the Colonies in 1840, ordered that no more of the criminal refuse should be carted out to that region. Then Tasmania had them all to herself for a while. Lord Stanley, when he came to be at the head of the Colonial Office, made an order that the free settlers of Tasmania were not to obtain convict labour at any lower rates than the ordinary market price; and Tasmania had only put up with the presence of the convicts at all for the sake of getting their labour cheap. Tasmania, therefore, began to protest against being made the refuseground for our scoundrelism. Mr. Gladstone, while Colonial Secretary, suspended the whole system for a while, but it was renewed soon after. Sir George Grey endeavoured to make the Cape of Good Hope a receptacle for a number of picked convicts; but in 1849 the inhabitants of Cape Colony absolutely re

1837.

THE TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE.

29

fused to allow a shipload of criminals to be discharged upon their shores, and it was manifestly impossible to compel them to receive such disagreeable guests. By this time public opinion in England was ready to sympathise to the full with any colony which stood out against the degrading system. For a long time there had been growing up a conviction that the transportation system carried intolerable evils with it. Romilly and Bentham had condemned it long before. In 1837 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider and report on the system. The committee included Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, Charles Buller, Sir W. Molesworth, and Lord Howick, afterwards Earl Grey. The evidence they collected settled the question in the minds of all thinking men. The Rev. Walter Clay, son of the famous prison chaplain, Rev. John Clay, says in his memoirs of his father, that probably no volume was ever published in England of which the contents were so loathsome as those of the appendix to the committee's report. There is not much exaggeration in this. The reader must be left to imagine for himself some of the horrors which would be disclosed by a minute account of what happened in a penal den like Norfolk Island, where a number of utterly brutalised men were left to herd together without anything like beneficent control, without homes, and without the society of women. In Norfolk Island the convicts worked in chains. They were roused at daylight in the morning, and turned out to labour in their irons, and huddled back in their dens at night. In some

rare cases convicts were sent directly from England to Norfolk Island; but as a rule the island was kept as a place of punishment for criminals who, already convicted in the mother country, were found guilty of new crimes during their residence in New South Wales.

The condition of things in New South Wales was such as civilisation has not often seen. In Sydney especially it was extraordinary. When the convicts were sent out to the colony they received each in turn, after a certain period of penal probation, a conditional freedom; in other words, a ticket of leave. They were allowed to work for the colonists, and to support themselves. Anyone who wanted labourers or artizans or servants, could apply to the authorities and have convicts assigned to him for the purpose. Female convicts as well as male were thus employed. There was, therefore, a large number of convicts, men and women, moving about freely in the active life of Sydney, doing business, working in trades, performing domestic service; to all appearance occupying the place that artizans and labourers and servants occupy among ourselves. But there was a profound difference. The convict labourers and servants were in reality little better than slaves. They were assigned to masters and mistresses, and they had to work. Stern laws were enacted, and were no doubt required, to keep those terrible subordinates in order. The lash was employed to discipline the men; the women were practically unmanageable. The magistrates had the power, on the complaint of any master or mistress, to

1837. SOCIETY IN THE CONVICT SETTLEMENTS.

31

order a man to be flogged with as many as fifty lashes. Some of the punishment lists remind a reader of the days of slavery in the United States. On every page we come on entries of the flogging of men for disobeying the orders of a master or mistress; for threatening a fellow-servant, for refusing to rub down the horse or clean the carriage, or some such breach of discipline. A master, who was also a magistrate, was not allowed to adjudicate in his own case; but practically it would seem that masters and mistresses could have their convict servants flogged whenever they thought fit. At that time a great many of the native population, 'the Blacks' as they were called, used to stream into the town of Sydney, as the Indians now come into Salt Lake City or some other western town of America. In some of the outlying houses they would lounge into the kitchens, as beggars used to do in Ireland in old days, looking out for any scraps that might be given to them. It was a common sight then to see half a dozen of the native women absolutely naked hanging round the doors of houses where they expected anything. Between the native women and the convicts at large an almost indiscriminate intercourse set in. The 'black' men would bring their wives into the town and offer them for a drop of rum or a morsel of tobacco. In this extraordinary society there were these three strands of humanity curiously intertwined. There was the civilised Englishman with his money, his culture, his domestic habits; there was the outcast of English civilisation, the gaol-bird fresh from the prison and the hulks;

and there was the aboriginal naked savage. In the drawing-room sat the wife and daughters of the magistrate; in the stable was the convict, whose crimes. had perhaps been successive burglaries crowned with attempted murder; in the kitchen were women servants taken from the convict depôt and known to be prostitutes; and hanging round the door were the savages, men and women. All the evidence seems to agree that with hardly any exceptions the women convicts were literally prostitutes. There were some exceptions, which it is well to notice. Witnesses who were questioned on the subject gave it as the result of their experience, that women convicted of any offence whatever in this country and sent out to New South Wales invariably took to profligacy, unless they were Irish women. That is to say, it did not follow that an Irish convict woman must necessarily be a profligate woman; it did follow as a matter of fact in the case of other women. Some of the convicts married women of bad character and lived on their immoral earnings, and made no secret of the fact. Many of these husbands boasted that they made their wives keep them in what they considered luxuries by the wages of their sin. Tea and sugar were great luxuries to them at that time, and it was a common saying among men of this class that their wives must take care to have the tea and sugar bag filled every day. The convicts soon inoculated the natives with the vilest vices and the foulest diseases of civilisation. Many an English lady found that her woman servants went off in the night somewhere and came back in