"It is impossible to exaggerate the brutal treatment that English industrial and commercial men dispensed to their dependents and helpers, or allowed by their legislatures to dispense to their dependents and helpers, at the time to which I refer. A bald, impartial statement would exceed in horror anything that the imagination could picture, and the wonder is not that the trust of the lower classes in their "superiors" was not forever broken in those days, but that the spirit of indignation kindled in their breasts did not lead to an implacable desire for vendetta, for revenge, which their progeny might have felt it their sacred duty to carry into effect. A nation that was able to melt into spinsterly tears during the first years of the nineteenth century over the negro slave-trade had founded a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and which in 1833 to 1834 had put an end to negro slavery, was yet able to endure within its midst a form of white slavery, the cruelties and horrors of which, practised as they were upon boys and girls of the tenderest age, exceed anything of the like that universal history can relate. When I think of these things, if often occurs to me that there must be thousands of exceptionally delightful and spirited people in Australia. For the period during which there was a penal station for English criminals at Port Jackson - that is to say, from 1788 to 1839 - coincides exactly with the blackest years in the history of English labour. All honour to these men and women who preferred to turn to crime rather than to submit, with their children, to the vulgar, heartless Leviathan which then reigned supreme in the North Country! And when I read that in 1821 there were 22,000 convicts in New South Wales, I cannot help believing that, if any of the descendants of these people still survive, they must be worth meeting and worth befriending." - Anthony M. Ludovici, A Defense of Aristocracy pp. 53-54
