upon a robbed and murdered man, and presently is arrested for
the crime. The explanation that would save him would also cause the
dreaded exposure of his mother, and so he withholds it, gives a false
name, and, having put himself beyond the means of defence and the
recognition of friends, is convicted and sentenced to transportation for
life.

In making all the subsequent career of Rufus Dawes abnormally
painful--that of a dumb sufferer who in sixteen years' confinement,
ending only in a tragic death, experiences by turns every form of
punishment and oppression--the author often touches, though it cannot be
said he ever exceeds, the limits of possibility.

'Need one who was not a hardened criminal have suffered so much and so
long?' is the question that continually recurs to the mind of the
reader; but it is suggested by the prolonged and pitiful sense of
unsatisfied justice rather than by any doubting that the extremes of
penal discipline as practised in the name of the British Government
between forty and sixty years ago could have been successively applied
to a single human being. The writer adheres relentlessly to his central
idea to the end. Dawes' unameliorated servitude and unavenged fate were
intended to symbolise glaring anomalies of justice which never were
remedied. The 'correction' he is subjected to was that which the laws of
the time permitted, and which in many cases goaded its victims to draw
lots to murder one another in order to escape from their misery.

Some of the least creditable features of convict transportation, of
which it was said by Earl Grey in 1857 that their existence had been a
disgrace to the nation, came to an end only when the system itself was
abolished. But novelist and statesman alike struck at the abuses without
feeling it necessary to mention any of the good results of the system.
Its inherent merits were strictly few, indeed; yet they ought to be
sought in history by anyone who would get a fair idea of the prison
policy of the period. It is, of course, inevitable that the criticism
conveyed in a strong imaginative work should fail to give a full view of
results so complex as those produced by the largely haphazard method of
the Australian penal settlements.

The practice of assigning prisoners to private employment, for example,
produced notable effects upon society, of which Marcus Clarke's story
gives but the faintest indication. If Rufus Dawes had been an ordinary
first o