Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/44

 punishments produced no more effect than the clemency of the governor, who remitted three hundred out of four hundred lashes to which one man was sentenced. The proverb that "hunger will break through stone walls," was exemplified night and day.

"So great was the villany [sic] of the people, or the necessity of the times, that a prisoner lying at the hospital from the effects of punishment, part of which he had received, contrived to get his irons off one leg, and in that state was caught robbing a farm;" but the historian reports that at Rosehill, where they had vegetables in abundance, no thefts were committed.

The Justinian, which brought relief from this state of destitution, was driven off Sydney Heads when within hail: it was for some hours doubtful whether she would not strike and become a total wreck on the reefs of Broken Bay. Had that event occurred, and the twelve hundred and fifty additional convicts safely made the port, death by starvation, or in a struggle for food, must have been the fate of the whole settlement.

Could it be wondered if, under such a system of despotism, without discipline in the colony, and in the face of such neglect at home, the descendants of these men had grown fiercely disloyal and anti-British? But yet it is not so. The Australians are a loyal, order-loving, law-obeying race, as they have recently proved more than once. Even gold-digging has not corrupted their honest hearts.

It was not until five years after Governor Phillip's landing that a temporary church was erected, and divine service performed on the 25th August, 1793.

The founders of New England—themselves tyrannical and intolerant, although flying from tyranny and intolerance—did not let a week elapse without making permanent arrangements for religious worship and education, which endure to this day, and have spread their humanising influences all over the wide empire of the American republic. In New South Wales, under the rule of a sovereign which some, disparaging the present, are accustomed to glorify as the reign of a specially Christian king, the penalties of lash, the pillory, the gallows, were administered as freely as teaching and preaching were neglected.

It sounds strangely in this age to hear that "the clergyman complaining of non-attendance at divine service," which was generally performed in the open air, alike unsheltered from wind and rain, as from the fervour of the summer's sun, "it was ordered that three pounds of flour should be deducted from the ration of each overseer, and two pounds from each labouring convict who should not attend