Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/356

Rh extraneous population could but be introduced which should eat the superfluity, and the Home Government be induced to pay the bill of fare, matters might even yet improve in Swan River. Conditions of this kind limited the choice of persons to convicts, but as these would be accompanied by a train of Government officials and police, the colonists decided upon asking for them, and accordingly petitioned that their country might be converted into a penal settlement. As such, its geographical disadvantages assumed a different character, for the havenless shore and impassable woods which had excluded trade, superseded in great measure the necessity of building prison walls. In fact, viewed simply as a jail, the colony appeared as if Nature had intended it for no other purpose, and this point having been duly recognized in England, the bidden guests soon arrived in such numbers as to give Fremantle a resemblance to the lion's den in the fable, the threshold of which bore traces only of footsteps that had entered, but of none that ever had returned.

I could not help remarking that an amusing sort of self-deception prevailed amongst the West Australians in a habit of expressing themselves as if they had done the mother-country a great favour in receiving the criminals whom they themselves had asked for, and that she could only relieve herself from a heavy burden of gratitude by the expenditure of correspondingly heavy sums of money for the good of her colonial benefactors.

My husband once asked a settler, with some surprise, at the close of a meeting which had been called for the purpose of urging upon Government the necessity of