Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/360

 the Crown, had important political effects. The convicts showed from the first a tendency to gather about Sydney, and a preference for town life. The free settlers, finding that the land available was each year more remote, began to seek means of livelihood in the city. The free labourer whose labour was not needed by the pastoralist, fully supplied from the ranks of prisoners, and who had not the capital to start farming on his own account, also turned towards Sydney. Thus the preponderance of the town population, so marked a feature of Australian life to-day, and so potent a cause of the democratic sentiment of the country, had already, by 1820, begun to show itself and grew yearly more marked.

Sociologically the history of New South Wales must remain for the present a complete puzzle. No one would at that time have prophesied, and no one would prophesy to-day, that the children born of convict parents would show no sign of their origin. Yet this was what happened, and the fact is not to be belittled by laying stress on the number of political prisoners or the harshness of the criminal laws. The political prisoners formed a very small minority, and though many convicts were transported for small offences, they were usually offences of a low type such as pocket-picking or receiving stolen goods. There is also no reason to suppose or at least no proof that the thieves, forgers, coiners and highway-robbers died childless; and as there were but few free women in the Colony, the female convicts must necessarily have been the mothers of the greater part of the first generation of Australian born. New South Wales thus carries before the world a banner of hope and a promise that future generations may yet escape from the bondage of past evils. Perhaps also the final justification for every mistake of Secretary of State or Governors, for the careless selection of administrators and subordinates, the continuance of an anomalous, unworkable and unpopular form of Government, may be found in the fact that the establishment of New South Wales led to the rehabilitation in a new environment of those who had fallen out of the social struggle, and gave to their descendants a part in the task of the present, the task of forming a nation high in ideals and in achievements, worthy of their heritage in the wide acres glowing in the golden sunlight of the Australian continent.