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produced a case without a flaw, and the judge told the jury pretty plainly what their verdict ought to be. Four lags in the box stood firm for "not guilty." 'They'd be damned if they hanged him!" was all that the foreman could get from them. One of the four pulled off his boots in the jurors' room; he would eat leather, he said, till the rest were of his mind. He added encouragingly that he had "eaten leather for a fortnight in the bush." The prisoner was

acquitted.

On the same day an emancipist was arraigned before the Supreme Court. He challenged one juror in the box. Asked to explain his objection, he "didn't exactly know-the gentleman was quite a stranger to him-he didn't like his appearThe stranger was the only juror in the

ance."

box who had not done time.

On another occasion, a summoning officer returned two summonses for the jury with characteristic endorsements. One of the expected jurors had been "transported for life" to a penal settlement in the colony; the other had been hanged for murder two years ago.'

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VII

But now, for a few moments, the other side of the picture. The Felon's Paradise (there were

those undoubtedly for whom it was the Felon's Hell) was also at this early stage a highlycivilised, a wealthy, an immensely productive, and a rapidly-advancing colony. The parent country, conscious at last of its illimitable resources, its capacities and possibilities, had condescended to bestow upon it some measure of encouragement. Botany Bay, steadily passing from the state of a semi-savage penal settlement, was shaping as a great commercial and agricultural community. The capital town had a population of twenty thousand; twenty-nine other post towns in various parts of the country maintained regular intercourse with one another and with Sydney; a territory several hundreds of miles in length and breadth had been opened up; and the entire colony contained at this date not fewer than eighty thousand souls. The revenue raised in 1836 was estimated at £200,000, or double the revenue drawn from the North American colonies of England when the population of those colonies had risen to three millions.

Sydney had its public buildings, substantial private residences, teeming warehouses, and overflowing shops; it was lighted with gas, and its streets were as crowded and animated in appearance as the most frequented highways of London.

The exports from the colony were reckoned at about a million sterling per annum; the imports,

principally British products, were of nearly the same value.

The free settlers had proved themselves a hardy, energetic, and enterprising race; but they could not unassisted, in five-and-twenty years, have brought the colony forward at this pace. They could not and they did not. The felonry was there, too; and it is perhaps not extravagant to urge that the felonry contributed the larger portion of the brains and genius of the nascent colony. From the very first, brains had been bestowed upon this colony in prodigal abundance. Every convict transport conveyed to Botany Bay men of the most various knowledge and attainments, men of well-nigh all ranks in the social order of England. Collectively these men were fitted for all arts, all crafts, all manner of industrial and commercial undertakings. There was no sort of project but could be set going to a prosperous tune in Botany Bay. On this side and that, skilled labour of every sort stood ready for employment; while for humbler tasks there was at no time any lack of hands. For the clearing of lands, the making of roads, the laying out of farms, the raising of public buildings-for all these important businesses the sinews of the convicts were available. They were executed, therefore, at the expense less of the colony than of the mother country, which expended large sums on their maintenance.

Planted in January 1788, by a few shiploads of criminals, the New South Wales of 1836 offered to the incredulous gaze of visitors from Great Britain "an epitome of the old and civilised society of England." Colleges were found there, with teachers in all branches of education. Charitable institutions, such as orphan schools, dispensaries, and a benevolent asylum, were generously supported. There were banks, assurance companies, and a society for promoting colonial produce. Sydney alone subscribed to thirteen weekly newspapers. A museum, an observatory, a botanical school, a mechanics' school of arts, and a school of industry were in full florescence. The New Chum received invitations to dinner-parties and dances, took tickets for concerts and the theatre, and was driven on a well-appointed coach to the race-course at Parramatta.

The progress of New South Wales during the first fifty years of its existence is probably without a parallel in the history of the world.

PIRATICAL

CERTAINLY there is a touch of fable in the history of the pirates. This, perhaps, is not surprising when one remembers that an air of fable surrounded the pirates themselves. Avery and Thatch, Roberts, Low, and Kidd, were names at which mariners grew pale. All persons who had sailed the seas where they kept their sleepless watch contributed something to the dreadful fame of the buccaneers. No history was ever doubted that dealt with the bravery, the cruelty, or the splendour of a pirate whose name had figured in Royal Proclamations, or whose exploits-real and imaginary-had been "composed into a play." Avery, for example, was given out as married to the daughter of the Great Mogul, and in a fair way to start a kingdom of his own; and this imposing fiction was still in circulation when Avery, long retired from the seas, was starving at Bideford, and importuning some merchants of Bristol " for the proceeds of certain "diamonds and vessels of gold" (plundered from a vessel of the Great Mogul himself) which he had delivered into their

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