Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/317

Rh system dreaded that West Australia, where golden Coolgardie had not yet been discovered, petitioned to share in the indirect benefits of it, and was a convict settlement from 1850 to 1868. A sanguine speculator only ten years ago proposed to colonize the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand with the sweepings of English jails and workhouses. It must be admitted that the apparent results go far to confound the criminologist; more law-abiding communities than these do not exist. What miracle has been wrought to bring wheat from tares and grapes from thistles? It is not enough to say that the flood of immigration to the gold fields has swamped the penal elements. Tasmania has had little gold and but few immigrants, yet Tasmania is as respectable as New South Wales. The self-destroying power of evil will account for the disappearance of much: there were always more men than women, and many of the women were barren, as is usual when both sexes are profligate; there were usually few children, and the convicts were not long-lived. On those that survived, and on their offspring, social influences were immensely powerful. As the chemistry of the earth (in Whitman's poem) absorbs the products of putrefaction and decay, and gives them back as luxuriant vegetation, the higher chemistry of an orderly and moralized society assimilates all that is good in disease and crime by utilizing the criminal and repressing and ultimately extirpating his antisocial impulses. These admissions being made, an irreducible residuum remains. The."white trash" of the Southern States has long been affiliated on the transported English prisoners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mr. Eggleston finds further traces of them in the "hereditarily pauper and criminal classes" of the North. Professor Fiske has come upon the tracks of the "mean white" in "little isolated groups of wretched hovels" among the mountain villages of New England. And other observers, forgetting the corruption of human nature and its perpetual downward tendency, have been tempted to discover in Australian towns and villages unmistakable evidence of convict ancestry.

2. Often almost as low in actual working, but unquestionably higher in theory and result, are the many military colonies through which rather the imperial than the properly colonizing nations have built up their empire. Their objects are everywhere the same: to hold in permanent subjection a country that has been conquered by arms, not won by commerce or industry, and to repress the incursions of hostile peoples. They are what Cicero called them, propugnacula imperii—"outworks of empire." The Assyrian colonies seem to have been of this type. The settlements differ somewhat in character, according to the quality of the troops employed. The lowest of them may have been the Nubian people whom Diocletian