THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 301 



tion system dreaded that "West Australia, where golden Coolgardie 

 had not yet been discovered, petitioned to share in the indirect bene- 

 fits of it, and was a convict settlement from 1850 to 1868. A san- 

 guine speculator only ten years ago proposed to colonize the Bay of 

 Plenty in N^ew 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 Kew South Wales. The self-de- 

 stroying 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 irredu- 

 cible residuum remains. The " white trash " of the Southern States 

 has long been affiliated on the transported English prisoners of the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wx. Eggleston finds further 

 traces of them in the " hereditarily pauper and criminal classes " of 

 the IvTorth. Professor Eiske 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, forget- 

 ting 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, propug- 

 nacula 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 



