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eighteenth century in England, where the gaols were daily visited by numerous individuals of various ranks, where the common-law rights of the subject had been established, where what was considered in those days 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 the law of the lash, tyranny became chronic, and the plague of cruelty festered and spread through the whole body corporate of the colony.

A singular succession of serious, pitiable, ludicrous, and disgraceful incidents mark the history of the settlement, from the day of proclaiming the king's commission to the end of the year 1800, which has been minutely recorded by Collins. At one time “ a person named Smith, on his way to India, professing some knowledge of agriculture," is engaged by the government, and created a peace-officer at Rosehill, the site of the future town of Paramatta, the said Smith being apparently the only freeman with any claims to the kind of knowledge on which the subsistence of the colony was likely to depend. At another, one Bryant, a Devonshire prisoner, employed in his calling of a fisherman, is detected in secreting and selling large quantities of fish, and is severely punished; but, "being too useful a person to part with, and send to the Brick Cart," he is retained to fish for the settlement.

This man afterwards escaped with his family and a party of other prisoners in an open boat to the Island of Timor; he was there captured by a man-of-war, and carried to Batavia, where he died. His wife was conveyed to England, tried, and confined in Newgate until the term of her original sentence expired!

Then we find convicts, "when little more than two years had elapsed," claiming their discharge on the ground that the time of their sentence had expired, which was possible, as it would date from the day of their sentences. When, in answer to these claims, inquiries are made for the documents containing the particulars, "it is found that they have been left in England, and that, therefore, it is impossible to affirm or deny the claims." Consequently, the prisoners are told they must wait for an answer to a despatch to be sent by the first opportunity to England, a period of two or three years. One of the prisoners, not very well pleased with the prospect of such delay, expresses himself

SIX HUNDRED LASHES FOR INSOLENCE.

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disrespectfully of the lieutenant-governor in the presence of the governor. Thereupon he is seized, tried by a criminal court, found guilty, and sentenced to receive six hundred lashes, and wear irons for the space of six months.

About the same time a soldier having been found guilty of a horrible criminal assault on a female child, his sentence is commuted to banishment for life to the auxiliary agricultural settlement of Norfolk Island.

These are but a few gems of the judicial system by which New South Wales was ruled for nearly the first quarter of a century of its

existence.

In 1790, the third year of colonization, the four ships arrived filled with convicts, of whom the greater number were in a dying state: two hundred and sixty-one had died at sea; two hundred were brought on shore in the last stage of exhaustion, from scurvy, dysentery, fever, foul food, and foul air. The men had been chained together in rows, and confined below nearly throughout the voyage, in order to save the parties in charge trouble. On board one of the ships, the Neptune, several of the prisoners had died in irons; their companions concealed their deaths in order to share the extra allowance of provisions, and the horrible fact was not discovered, so slight was the supervision, until betrayed by the offensiveness of putrefaction.

Many years elapsed before a system was adopted by which the preservation of the health of prisoners and troops became the interest as well as the duty of the surgeon in charge. At that time the more and the sooner prisoners died the more profitable the transaction was to the contractor; so they died commonly like rotten sheep.

Those were the days in which transportation really was a punishment almost as terrible as death. New South Wales was an awful over-sea gaol, offering no prospect of advancement or liberation, where the will of a prisoner-turnkey was law, where death was the punishment of the most trifling crimes, and a reproachful look was punished with the lash.

A few days before four ships landed one thousand male and two hundred and fifty female convicts, the arrival of one storeship, the Justinian, saved the whole colony from perishing of famine. The Guardian, laden with a great supply of provisions, stores, and live stock, under the command of Rion, "the gallant good Rion" of Campbell's "Battle of Copenhagen,” had struck on an iceberg, and, after almost all the cargo had been thrown overboard, was with difficulty carried into the Cape of Good Hope. For weeks before the arrival

of the Justinian the whole settlement had been put on short allowance. The governor, says Collins, had thrown his store, 300lbs. of flour, into the common stock. The weekly allowance of each prisoner had been reduced to 2lbs. of salt pork, 24 lbs. of flour, and 2lbs. of rice. "Labour stood suspended for want of energy to proceed; the countenances of the people plainly bespoke the hardships they underwent." "Garden-robbing became prevalent, the most severe measures were employed to repress the crime caused by, and yet increasing, the effects of the scarcity, but in vain. A man caught by the clergyman stealing potatoes was sentenced to three hundred lashes, to have his ration of flour stopped for six months, and to be chained for that period to two others caught robbing the governor's garden; but this and many similar punishments produced no more effect than the clemency of the governor, who remitted three hundred out of four hundred lashes to which one man was sentenced." The proverb that "hunger will break through stone walls" was exemplified night and day.

"So great was the villany of the people, or the necessity of the times, that a prisoner lying at the hospital from the effects of punishment, part of which he had received, contrived to get his irons off one leg, and in that state was caught robbing a farm;" but the historian reports that at Rosehill, where they had vegetables in abundance, no thefts were committed.

The Justinian, which brought relief from this state of destitution, when within hail was driven off Sydney Heads: it was for some hours doubtful whether she would not strike and become a total wreck on the reefs by Broken Bay. If after that event the twelve hundred and fifty additional convicts had safely made the port, death by starvation, or in a struggle for food, must have been the fate of the whole settlement.

Could it be wondered if, under such a system of despotism, without discipline in the colony, and in the face of such neglect at home, the descendants of these men had grown fiercely disloyal and antiBritish? But yet it is not so. The Australians are a loyal, orderloving, law-obeying race, as they have recently proved more than once. Even-gold-digging has not corrupted their honest hearts.

It was not until five years after Governor Phillip's landing that a temporary church was erected, and divine service performed on the 25th August, 1793.

The founders of New England-themselves tyrannical and intolerant, although flying from tyranny and intolerance did not let a week elapse without making permanent arrangements for religious worship

A GERMAN OVERSEER IGNORANT OF ENGLISH.

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and education which endure to this day, and have spread their humanizing influences all over the wide empire of the American republic. While under the rule of a sovereign which some, disparaging the present, are accustomed to specially glorify as the reign of a Christian king, the lash, the pillory, the gallows, were afforded as freely as teaching and preaching were neglected.

It sounds strangely in this age to hear that, "the clergyman complaining of non-attendance at divine service," which was generally performed in the open air, alike unsheltered from wind and rain, as from the fervour of the summer's sun, "it was ordered that three pounds of flour should be deducted from the ration of each overseer, and two pounds from each labouring convict, who should not attend prayers once on each Sunday, unless some reasonable excuse for absence should be assigned."

In 1791 (April) we find Mr. Schaffer, a German, arriving from England as a superintendent of convicts; but ondiscovery that, as he spoke no English, he was unable to discharge his duties, he retired, and accepted a grant of land of 140 acres at Rosehill. One cannot help feeling curious to know under whose patronage and for what services a German, not speaking English, was sent as superintendent of convicts at the antipodes. Is it possible that Miss Burney's friend, Madame Schwellenberg, could have had anything to do with this little appointment?

At the same time James Ruse received a grant of the same quantity of land as a reward for being the first settler who had declared himselt able to support himself on a farm he had occupied fifteen months, and to dispense with an allowance from the government stores.

These incidents, with the arrival, in two detachments, of a regiment raised for the purpose of serving in the colony, under the title of the New South Wales Corps, are the most remarkable events during the latter years of the reign of Governor Phillip, who resigned his office to Lieutenant-Governor Grose, and returned to England on the 11th December, 1792.

At that date there were sixty-seven settlers, holding under grant three thousand four hundred and seventy acres, of which four hundred and seventeen acres were in cultivation, and a hundred more cleared. We have no means of ascertaining where all these grants were situated, but the greater part is now occupied as building land, and was miserably barren, yet covered with gigantic gum-trees.

But this summary of the cultivation by free or freedmen settlers is interesting, because it marks the first step towards rendering the colony self-supporting. These settlers were, if they required, victualled and

clothed from the public store for eighteen months from the time of their going on their grants, furnished with tools and implements of husbandry, grain to sow their grounds, such stock as could be spared from the public, and, at the discretion of the governor, the use of as many convicts as they would undertake to clothe, feed, and employ. Every free or freed man had a hut erected on his farm at public expense.

On ground of ordinary fertility, with settlers of average industry, these terms would have ensured early independence; but the greater part of the district was and is as barren as the seashore, and the majority of the settlers who were not idle were perfectly ignorant of agriculture. As for the difficulties of cutting down and removing the forests of gum-trees, they were so great that, without the assistance of compulsory convict labour for a quarter of a century, the Sydney district never could have been cleared.

During this period, the government was obliged to carry on cultivation as well as it could on public account, although with indifferent success. A principle as old as the first step the first tribes made toward civilization, which, however, many statesmen and economists even now appear not to understand, was illustrated by the answer of a settler, when he was reproached with not having worked so well for the jointstock account as he did on his own grant of land,-" We are working for ourselves now."

The following were the prices of agricultural stock and produce at the close of 1792:

Flour, 9d. per lb.

Potatoes, 3d. per lb.

Sheep (the Cape breed), £10 10s. each.

Milk goats, £8 8s.

Breeding sows, £7 7s. to £10 10s.

Laying fowls, 10s.

Tea, 8s. to 16s. per lb.

Sugar, 1s. 6d. per lb.

Spirits, 12s. to 20s. per gallon.

Porter, 1s. per quart.

At these famine prices the mortality among the convict population was fearful. Between the 1st January and the 31st December, 1792, there died two persons of the civil department, six soldiers, four hundred and eighteen male convicts, eighteen female convicts, and seventy-nine children.

Governor Phillip took with him to England two of the aborigines, with whom, throughout the period of his government, he had endea

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