provinces which might become
empires, they 'should endeavour to make them, not seats of malefactors
and convicts, but communities which may set examples of virtue and
happiness.'

This mild, platitudinous rebuke came when all the damage was done. It
remained for the free inhabitants of Australia to point to a plainer
principle in declaring that 'the inundating of feeble and dependent
colonies with the criminals of the parent State is opposed to that
arrangement of Providence by which the virtue of each community is
destined to combat its own vice.'

To illustrate in a single story all the most prominent and pernicious
features of the transportation system, Clarke had to invent a case of
crime in which the criminal, unlike the majority of the worst offenders
sent to the settlements, should always be worthy of the reader's
sympathy. It was necessary that the felon be a victim as well as a
felon; that he should not regain his liberty in any form, but continue
by a series of offences against the authority of his gaolers to
experience and display all the successive severities of Macquarie
Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island. A fundamental fact to be
exhibited was the impassable gulf of misunderstanding that might exist
between capricious or incompetent prison officials and a criminal who,
for any reason, had once come to be regarded as hopelessly vicious. 'We
must treat brutes like brutes,' says the prime martinet of the story:
'keep 'em down, sir; make 'em _feel_ what they are. They're here to
work, sir. If they won't work, flog 'em until they will. If they
work--why, a taste of the cat now and then keeps 'em in mind of what
they may expect if they get lazy.'

The author chose to represent the extreme case of a man who, innocent of
a murder charged against him, allowed himself to be transported under an
assumed name in order to prevent the exposure of a long-concealed act of
unfaithfulness on the part of a beloved mother.

Richard Devine is the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in
early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich
plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after
twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her
high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home
for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms the wife
is spared. Richard Devine goes on the instant. Crossing Hampstead Heath,
he comes