OCCUPATION OF AUSTRALIA. 19 needed the fostering hand of the governor in promoting agriculture and the arts which sustain life, it must be con- fessed that man was brought face to face with an experi- ment of which there was no previous example, and the difficulties of which were enormously augmented by remote- ness from the mother country. His was not the task of Cortes or Pizarro — to conquer and control a civilized com- munity by force of arms. Nor had a colony been previously founded in the manner now to be attempted. To found a colony after the manner of the Greeks, was for members of any state to migrate to a chosen site. They carried with them their slaves, numerous enough to prevent scarcity of labourers in the new land, and they were npt far removed from the parent state. To establish a military colony by dispossessing or enslaving the previous inhabitants, and by throwing over the new- comers the awful aegis of Eoman protection, was merely to give to the latter with a high hand the accumulated pro- ducts of previous generations of labourers and capitalists. To neither of these methods was there anything analogous in the experiment undertaken by the ministry of Pitt. Labour was to be compulsory, but it was that of criminals under sentence. There were no fruits of other men's labour to appropriate. To preserve peace and secure order, a military force was to be maintained ;^^ but it was to be maintained under governors, to whom was delegated the task of making the settlement a nucleus from which other settlements should swarm, so that the new South Continent might become the undisputed possession of the British Crown, and the future home of millions of the British people. The problem before Pitt and his colleagues was a mixed one. He had to secure the new land for his country. He •* Dairy mple, the hydrographer, denounced the colony. The govern- ment would, he said, be utterly unable to control the convicts, who would, as buccaneers, become the terror of the seas, and a disgrace to England and the world. In a philanthropic spirit "the benevolent Howard," seeing the miseries of convicts in the gaols and hulks, deplored that penitentiaries were not built at Islington, and that the designs of himself and Dr. Fothergill had been defeated by those who " adopted the ex- pensive, dangerous, and destructive scheme of transportation to Botany Bay." — Memoirs of John Howard the Philanthropist, p. 533. LondoUv 1818. c 2
Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/47
This page needs to be proofread.
19
19
