Situated in semi-tropical latitudes, richly gifted by nature, picturesque, fertile, of fairly equable climate, this small spot seemed to contain within itself all the elements of a terrestrial paradise. It was finely timbered, chiefly with the graceful tree known as the Norfolk Island pine; limes, lemons, and guavas were indigenous; all manner of fruits--oranges, grapes, figs, loquats, bananas, peaches, pomegranates, pineapples, and melons--grew there in rare profusion. Flowers, wild or cultivated, throve everywhere. On all sides the eye rested on long fields of oats, or barley, or Indian maize. And yet the social condition of the island, as compared with its external aspect, was as the inner diseased core of an apple to its smooth and rosy skin. From the earliest days of the Australian colonies this bountifully gifted island had been made the sink of all the lees and dregs of mankind. Occupied in the first instance on account of its fertile aspect, it was soon afterwards abandoned for no sound or substantial reasons. By and by it was again re-occupied, but then only as a penal settlement. And as such it served New South Wales during all the years that transportation was in full swing. It was a prison, and nothing more; convicts and their keepers were its only population. The former at times varied in numbers: one year there were five hundred, another seven; but their lot and condition was always much the same. The worst wore chains. All worked, but not enough to hurt themselves; and the well-conducted were allowed, as their time dragged along, certain immunities from labour and a modicum of tobacco. Occasionally the gaol-gangs, the most depraved of this gathering of wickedness, broke loose, and attacked their guards with brutal desperation. Numbers were always shot down then and there, and of the balance, when overpowered, a fair proportion were forthwith hanged. Stated broadly, life in Norfolk Island was so bitter to the convict that many for choice sought death. Thus was Norfolk Island constituted, and such the condition of its residents, when the home government, in working out its new penal scheme, resolved to increase the numbers on the island, by drafting to it the most flagrant offenders from home. We have come by this time to accept it as an axiom in prison affairs, that it is unwise to concentrate in one spot the pith and essence of rascality; preferring rather to subdivide and distribute the most dangerous elements at several points. But the statesmen who were then legislating on penal matters ignored this principle; they forgot that they were about to recruit the old gangs at Norfolk Island by the very men most predisposed to become as bad as those they found there. If the administration had been really anxious to perpetuate the leaven of wickedness already existent in the penal settlement, they could not have devised a plan more likely to attain that result.