out of place and burthensome to a clergyman employed in the charge of an ordinary country parish.
When the depôts were first established in various country towns, and road parties were sent out to work in the country districts, often at distances of twenty and thirty miles from the nearest church, the question as to the religious superintendence of the convicts seems, at first, to have escaped notice. The country chaplains had been accustomed to regard their flocks as being composed of three classes—the first of which consisted of the free settlers, the second of those convicts who had received their ticket-of-leave and become to a considerable extent free men, and the third comprising those who had served the full time of their sentence and become expirees.
The original ground of the appointment of chaplains in the country districts was the dread felt by the settlers lest a large population of such manumitted prisoners should grow up around them, unwatched, untaught, and uncared for; and it was chiefly from the hope that a resident clergyman might influence these liberated men, and strive to improve them, that parsonages and churches were built throughout the colony. The chaplains, naturally, looked upon the settlers and "freed men" as forming their true parishioners, and regarded the convicts still under prison restraint, who were sent to the depôts in their district, as a distinct and separate class, who were governed by rules and forms of which they knew nothing, and who ought to have special chaplains to take charge of them as long as they were under prison rule.
To learn that three or four large road parties had been sent into his district gave a chaplain, in the earlier years
