Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/375

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346
SKETCHES IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

apportion a full day's labour every Sunday. The pain to the warder of desecrating the Christian day of rest was probably none the less from the fact of his being a Scotchman; in his own words, the marking out of the Sunday task "made the blood run chill in his veins."

At the time of our first acquaintance with Western Australia, the question of how the convicts in the road parties and country depôts should be furnished with religious instruction, did not appear to have come under the consideration of the Home Government. The two chief prisons at Fremantle and Perth were indeed supplied with chaplains specially appointed, whose entire duties lay within the prison walls, and as long as the men remained in either of these two jails all was as it should be—the chaplains possessed their legitimate position and authority, and the men were properly cared for, moreover the means existed of obtaining a salutary influence by private intercourse with each individual prisoner.

But when the prisoners were sent away from Fremantle to the depots or road parties in the interior, the case was altered. No chaplains were officially employed solely as jail chaplains to the depôts or road parties, although the men were just as much under prison discipline and restraint as their brethren in the "Establishment," and it is usually thought advisable that a clergyman employed in the care of prisoners still in confinement should be able to devote his attention to them exclusively, and should have no other employment. The strict attention to rule and method, the constant reference to prison regulations, the endless number of printed forms to be filled up daily, all of which things are matters of necessity in a prison, seem