The convict life in Tasmania was so unendurable, and suicide so difficult to accomplish that once or twice despairing men got together and drew straws to determine which of them should kill another of the group—­this murder to secure death to the perpetrator and to the witnesses of it by the hand of the hangman!

The incidents quoted above are mere hints, mere suggestions of what convict life was like—­they are but a couple of details tossed into view out of a shoreless sea of such; or, to change the figure, they are but a pair of flaming steeples photographed from a point which hides from sight the burning city which stretches away from their bases on every hand.

Some of the convicts—­indeed, a good many of them—­were very bad people, even for that day; but the most of them were probably not noticeably worse than the average of the people they left behind them at home.  We must believe this; we cannot avoid it.  We are obliged to believe that a nation that could look on, unmoved, and see starving or freezing women hanged for stealing twenty-six cents’ worth of bacon or rags, and boys snatched from their mothers, and men from their families, and sent to the other side of the world for long terms of years for similar trifling offenses, was a nation to whom the term “civilized” could not in any large way be applied.  And we must also believe that a nation that knew, during more than forty years, what was happening to those exiles and was still content with it, was not advancing in any showy way toward a higher grade of civilization.

If we look into the characters and conduct of the officers and gentlemen who had charge of the convicts and attended to their backs and stomachs, we must grant again that as between the convict and his masters, and between both and the nation at home, there was a quite noticeable monotony of sameness.

Four years had gone by, and many convicts had come.  Respectable settlers were beginning to arrive.  These two classes of colonists had to be protected, in case of trouble among themselves or with the natives.  It is proper to mention the natives, though they could hardly count they were so scarce.  At a time when they had not as yet begun to be much disturbed—­not as yet being in the way—­it was estimated that in New South Wales there was but one native to 45,000 acres of territory.

People had to be protected.  Officers of the regular army did not want this service—­away off there where neither honor nor distinction was to be gained.  So England recruited and officered a kind of militia force of 1,000 uniformed civilians called the “New South Wales Corps” and shipped it.

This was the worst blow of all.  The colony fairly staggered under it.  The Corps was an object-lesson of the moral condition of England outside of the jails.  The colonists trembled.  It was feared that next there would be an importation of the nobility.