ed
by purchase; and these persons, by the influence of wealth and property,
rose into colonial rank and authority, though without any such real
training in the sense of uprightness or morality as could fit them for
the posts they occupied. The least tainted by crime were the Irish, who
had been deported by wholesale after the rebellion, some without even a
form of trial, but these were idle and prone to violence; while of the
regular convicts there was a large proportion addicted to every brutality
that vice could conceive, and their numbers were continually being
recruited by fresh shiploads after the assizes at home. The only attempt
at securing order and tolerable safety was by visiting every offence,
even the slightest, of which a convict was accused in a court of justice,
with the most unrelenting severity; and this, of course, had the effect
of further brutalizing these felon people, making them reckless of the
deeds they committed, and often driving them to become
bush-rangers--outlawed wild men of the woods--a terror to the colony. A
powerful military force was kept up to repress these wretched beings by
physical force, but of moral training there was only what was afforded by
the openings for industry in a new country, and religious teaching was
represented by--two chaplains, for convicts, soldiers, settlers, and all!
No wonder that the senior soon broke down under the hopeless toil of such
a position, and left the junior to struggle with it alone. And nobly he
did struggle! Wilberforce had made a wise choice of a man in the prime
of youth, whose bullet-headed portrait speaks of the most dogged
determination, with nerves, health, and weight enough to contend for a
whole lifetime with the horrible depravity around him--the only
clergyman, and with three settlements far apart dependent on his
ministry. And in the outset he was severely tried by domestic sorrows;
for his eldest son, at two years old, was thrown out of his mother's arms
by a jolt to the carriage over the rough road, and killed on the spot;
and a younger child, who was shortly after left at home from dread of a
similar accident, was allowed by its attendant to stray into the kitchen,
where it fell backwards into a pan of boiling water and was fatally
scalded.

The father bore these calamities as one who had steadfast faith and
resignation--"one who felt much and said little." The demands on his
time, indeed, left him no leisure for giving way