Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/377

348 of transportation, much of the same sort of feeling with which his English brother would regard the quartering of a body of soldiers in his parish for a lengthened stay. The chaplains were willing to do all that lay in their power for these unfortunate men, such as lending them books, visiting them when ill, giving them a service on the Sunday when it was possible to pass near a road party on the way to one of their own churches, and so forth: but the generality of the country chaplains considered that their chief duties were towards the families of the settlers, and of the ticket-of-leave class, and that anything they could do for the unreleased convicts was of secondary importance in comparison.

It is a pity that when the subject first began to acquire importance by the rapid increase in the number of road parties, and of the number of patients in the depôt hospitals, the Home Government did not ask all the chaplains whether they would be willing, officially, to undertake the duties of visiting the road parties and depôts if they were paid a small increase to their stipends, and were granted an allowance to enable them to keep a horse. Very few chaplains would have refused, probably not even one, and much unpleasant feeling and dissatisfaction would have been avoided.

Matters are now completely altered—the country chaplains are now as thoroughly prison chaplains as their brother at the Fremantle prison, except indeed in point of income. They are now obliged to devote by far the greater part of their time to periodical visits to all the road parties in their district, of some twenty miles by thirty, perhaps, in extent. The forms which they are