d, Australia became an English penal
colony after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in the United
States of America. An Irish element came into the colony in the last
decade of the eighteenth century when, during the Orange reign of
terror, upwards of a thousand people from the west of Ireland were
deported by the Ulster magistrates and by Lord Carhampton, the
notorious "Satanides", who was charged with the pacification of
Connacht. And during the first three decades of the nineteenth
century the stream of Irish transportation flowed on. As a result of
the Tithes agitation, the Charter and Reform movements, the
Combination Laws and the Corn Laws, many more Irishmen were forced
across the sea. It was not until 1868 that the convict system was
permanently abolished.

It is difficult for us of a later day to realize the meaning of that
word, transportation. Let us form some conception of what the Irish
exiles suffered from the graphic picture painted in colors, somber
but not untrue, by one who knew from firsthand experience the lot of
the political prisoner. Writes Dr. Ullathorne in _The Horrors of
Transportation_:

"Take any one of you, my dear readers; separate him from his wife,
from his children, from all those whose conversation makes life dear
to him; cast him on the ends of the earth; let him there fall amongst
reprobates who are the last stain and disgrace of our common nature;
give him those obscene-mouthed monsters for his constant companions
and consolers; let the daily vision of their progress from infamy to
infamy, until the demon that inspires them has exhausted invention
and the powers of nature together, be his only example; house him, at
night, in a bark hut on a mud floor, where he has less comfort than
your cattle in their stalls; awake him from the troubled dreams of
his wretched wife and outcast children, to feel how far he is from
their help, and take him out at sunrise; work him under a burning
sun, and a heartless overseer, and the threat of the lash until the
night fall; give him not a penny's wages but sorrow; leave him no
hope but the same dull, dreary round of endless drudgery for many
years to come; let him see no opening by which to escape, but through
a long, narrow prospect of police courts, of gaols, of triangles, of
death cells, and of penal settlements; let him all the while be
clothed in a dress of shame, that shows to every living soul his
degradation; and if he dare to sell any