from the men's own point of view, "a long sentence" appeared to confer a certain degree of dignity.
I remember a poor decrepit old Yorkshireman emphasizing, with many shakes of the head, the fact of his sentence having been "Two-and-twenty year, and I've served every one of 'em!" His air and his manner, in pronouncing these words, was that of a man who might have been quitting as honourable a calling as the army or navy, with an extra pension for good conduct. He had been lodged for a time, on account of old age and infirmity, in the asylum at Fremantle, which receives within its walls both sane and insane persons, and when I remonstrated with him on his having quitted it he assigned as a reason for doing so that the exercise yard of the "barmy fellows," as he called the madmen, (meaning, I suppose, that their brains were in an unnatural state of working,) was but a stone's throw from himself and his rational companions, a circumstance of which the inmates of the said yard were accustomed to avail themselves, according to his account, in a literal sense, for the purpose of annoying their neighbours by volleys of pebbles.
One result of petitioning for convicts, which year by year will make itself more heavily felt, is the burden of maintaining so great a number of useless persons as these poor quondam rogues become in their old age. A large pauper population would be bad enough, even if it were composed of no worse elements than the men belonging to the earlier convict ships; but of the later human consignments the best that could be said was, that they were utterly useless as labourers, and that the aggregate was made up of hardened villains. Under these circumstances
