Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/232

 worse than the men, and are generally found at the bottom of every infamous transaction that is committed in the colony."

In all accounts of the early days of the colony the arrival of convicts called "the Scotch Martyrs" finds conspicuous place. They are described as if they were all equally amiable, equally ardent for the good of mankind, and martyred through an ignorant panic which seized the British government, and blinded them to the fact that the Martyrs merely sought for parliamentary reform. Even the sober page of history has assumed that they were speculative philanthropists, who were brutally transported in the company of felons. In a more ephemeral work, entitled "Reminiscences of Glasgow," it is gravely stated that "Margarot was a light-hearted Englishman, with a sprightly wife who died in grief soon after his banishment;" and on a monument at Carlton Hill in Edinburgh is to be seen an inscription linking together the names of Muir, Palmer, Skirving, Margarot, and Gerald.

Those who have waded through the records of the time, and the MSS. which serve to explain them, must smile at the facility of belief extended to gross errors. It is true that Muir, Gerald, and their associates laboured ostensibly for reform in Parliament, but it is equally true that these associates mapped out Great Britain in departments, that they invited representatives in Convention after the fashion of the French Revolutionists, that they corresponded with the most fervid French anarchists, and that they eagerly awaited (to use their own language) an invasion of England "by the hero of Italy and the brave veterans of the great nation."

The question, however, as to whether Pitt and Dundas were wise in their treatment of the London Corresponding Society, the Edinburgh British Convention, and similar associations, is rather for English than Australian history. It was a declared struggle for life or death, for the maintenance or the uprooting of the constitution. Pitt succeeded, and his defence of his conduct may be read in his speech in the House of Commons on the 7th May 1793, while the strife was at the hottest. The allegations that the Scotch Martyrs were ill-treated after conviction are refuted by their own words. Muir, Palmer, Margarot, and Skirving arrived