332 A COLONIAL AUTOCRACY. 



the Crown, had important political effects. The convicts showed 

 from the first a tendency to gather about Sydney, and a pre- 

 ference for town life. The free settlers, finding that the land 

 available was each year more remote, began to seek means of 

 livelihood in the city. The free labourer whose labour was not 

 needed by the pastoralist, fully supplied from the ranks of 

 prisoners, and who had not the capital to start farming on his 

 own account, also turned towards Sydney. Thus the pre- 

 ponderance of the town population, so marked a feature of 

 Australian life to-day, and so potent a cause of the democratic 

 sentiment of the country, had already, by 1820, begun to show 

 itself and grew yearly more marked. 



Sociologically the history ;of New South Wales must remain 

 for the present a complete puzzle. No one would at that time 

 have prophesied, and no one would prophesy to-day, that the 

 children born of convict parents would show no sign of their 

 origin. Yet this was what happened, and the fact is not to be 

 belittled by laying stress on the number of political prisoners or 

 the harshness of the criminal laws. The political prisoners 

 formed a very small minority, and though many convicts were 

 transported for small offences, they were usually offences of a 

 low type such as pocket-picking or receiving stolen goods. 

 There is also no reason to suppose or at least no proof that the 

 thieves, forgers, coiners and highway -robbers died childless ; and 

 as there were but few free women in the Colony, the female 

 convicts must necessarily have been the mothers of the greater 

 part of the first generation of Australian born. New South 

 Wales thus carries before the world a banner of hope and a 

 promise that future generations may yet escape from the bond- 

 age of past, evils. Perhaps also the final justification for every 

 mistake of Secretary of State or Governors, for the careless 

 selection of administrators and subordinates, the continuance of 

 an anomalous, unworkable and unpopular form of Government, 

 may be found in the fact that the establishment of New South 

 Wales led to the rehabilitation in a new environment of those who 

 had fallen out of the social struggle, and gave to their descendants 

 a part in the task of the present, the task of forming a nation high 

 in ideals and in achievements, worthy of their heritage in the wide 

 acres glowing in the golden sunlight of the Australian continent. 



