The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women Read Online Free PDF Page B

Scottish Enlightenment, suggested that benevolence arose from the instinctive human commitment toward “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” Man’s morality, he believed, would inspire “a determination to be pleased with the happiness of others and to be uneasy at their misery.” 8
    Enlightened optimism like Hutcheson’s faded in favor of luminaries voicing more cynical views about the future of humanity. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population , published in 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus argued that in accordance with the laws of nature, famine and starvation would weed out the poor, thus alleviating the strain of population growth on modern civilization. He recommended that the underprivileged be prevented from marrying and having children. 9 A father of three, he felt exempt from this proclamation because of his wealth. Following his logic, Agnes McMillan should not have been born.
    A controversial celebrity of his time, Malthus advocated against the Poor Laws and any assistance that might help sustain the struggling. This was the brand of popular thinking that permitted the abuses of power under the Transportation Act, including shipping twenty-five thousand girls and women to the other side of the world, Agnes and Janet among them.
    Throughout the British Isles, madness and hypocrisy permeated politics and everyday life. In 1820, a child who stole clothing could be banished and worked to death in Australia, but George IV, a known bigamist and suspected murderer, would be crowned king. King George IV humiliated Queen Caroline when he continued his relationship with a commoner to whom he’d been secretly married years earlier. Her Highness, too, engaged in scandalous behavior, including dressing in see-through gowns during alleged affairs with her servants. Her death in 1821 was widely attributed to poisoning by His Majesty.
    The Industrial Revolution heightened society’s imbalances. It fattened the prosperous and starved the weak, widening the chasm between classes and creating an incubator for juvenile criminals like Agnes and Janet. In earlier decades, parish schools in rural villages welcomed children during the slower farming cycles and fostered a relatively high literacy rate. Had Agnes been born into an agrarian family, hard labor would still have been her fate, but she would have eaten better food, grown up in healthier surroundings, and perhaps learned to read. Though farm hands labored long and hard, there were changes in pace and a variety in chores, unlike the perpetual monotony that poisoned the factory floor. Farm children were valued by their parents, if for no other reason than their ability to work the fields. This bond helped keep rural families intact.
    Factories, on the other hand, demanded labor every day of the week, every month of the year. As industry enhanced technology, it stunted education for the poor, and literacy declined. There were simply not enough hours in the day for children to learn to read and write. The lowest classes, following the lure of progress, traded a self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle for enslavement in an urban jungle. From 1780 to 1830, child labor grew exponentially, largely due to the end of a family-centered economy.
    Well on its way to becoming one of the largest cities in Europe and already Scotland’s most congested, Glasgow had grown to a population of two hundred thousand. As daylight broke, low-lying smog erased the city’s color. Ashen figures wandered hopelessly through a black-and-white world. By Christmas 1832, Agnes’s hometown, unrivaled in squalor, was dirtier and more dangerous than any city in the empire.
    This was a far cry from the pristine paradise enjoyed by Glasgow’s seventy thousand inhabitants just thirty years earlier. The city’s name came from the Gaelic Glaschu, or “clean green place.” English writer Daniel Defoe described eighteenth-century Glasgow as “one of the cleanliest, most beautiful and best