Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/156

 58 A VAIN PETITION. 1787 women needed instruction in one way as mnch as the cliil- dren did in another. One minister of religion only had been sent out — the Rev. Richard Johnson, " one of the people called Methodists;'^* and he was left to preach in the open cha ^ain °"* ^^ ^T^^^ he found moans to put np a thatch-roofed building for religious service. Had the petition of the Roman Catholic priests met with more consideration than it did, Phillip's labours would have been greatly lessened in his efforts to reform the degraded characters around him. The combined Influence of influence of the clergy would have been on his side, and he the clergy. , ^'^ ' might have been spared the humiliation of applying to the marines for aid in one of his greatest difficulties, and being refused. He was thus forced to govern with the lash and the hangman's rope. How much misery and how much crime might have been avoided had Lord Sydney and his colleagues but recognised one of the simplest truths in political philosophy, by arming Phillip with the moral and religious assistance he required, may be left to conjecture. But in this, as in many other A mercUees instances, may be seen how hard and merciless was the age yet learned that every government lives under a moral obliga- tion to prevent crime as well as to punish it ; and when, not- withstandiug the severity of their laws, they found its growth unchecked, they saw no other remedy but that of increased severity. A short shrift and a bloody shroud was the usual fate of the unhappy wretches condemned to die, even when the crime was not more serious than a theft committed under the pressure of hunger. Many of these criminals, too, were mere boys, in most cases wholly uneducated, who had been left in childhood to seek their means of living in the streets. How the question of juvenile crime and depravity was juTenUe looked at by Pitt and his colleagues may be seen in a speech delivered by the Solicitor-General in the House of Commons 1793. offenders, Digitized by Google
 * in which they lived. The statesmen of that time had not
 * Major Grose, in a despatch to the Home Secretary, 4 September,