Even in the establishment of a sick-club and a burial-club, Captain Maconochie applied “the inflexible principle of giving nothing for nothing.” That is to say, here, as throughout, he made the discipline of the prisoners as {176} much like the discipline of ordinary life as possible: let them experience just such good or evil as naturally flowed from their conduct—a principle which he rightly asserts is the only true one. What were the effects? The extreme debasement of Norfolk Island convicts was notorious; and on a preceding page we have described some of the horrible sufferings inflicted on them. Yet, starting with these most demoralized of criminals, Captain Maconochie obtained highly-favourable results. “In four years,” he says, “I discharged 920 doubly-convicted men to Sydney, of whom only 20, or 2 per cent., had been re-convicted up to January, 1845;” while, at the same time, the ordinary proportion of re-convicted Van Diemen’s Land men, otherwise trained, was 9 per cent. “Captain Maconochie,” writes Mr. Harris in his _Settlers and Convicts_, “did more for the reformation of these unhappy wretches, and amelioration of their physical circumstances, than the most sanguine practical mind could beforehand have ventured even to hope.” Another witness says—“a reformation far greater than has been hitherto effected in any body of men by any system, either before or after yours, has taken place in them.” “As pastor of the island, and for two years a magistrate, I can prove that at no period was there so little crime,” writes the Rev. B. Naylor. And Thomas H. Dixon, Chief Superintendent of Convicts in Western Australia, who partially introduced the system there in 1856, asserts that not only was the amount of work done under it extraordinary, but that “even although the characters of some of the party were by no means good previously (many of them being men whose licences had been revoked in England), yet the transformation which in this and all other respects they underwent, was very remarkable indeed.” If such were the results, when the method was imperfectly carried out (for the Government all along refused to give any fixed value to the marks as a means to liberation); what might be {177} expected if its motives and restraints were allowed their full influence?