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argued. I could also have argued that my brother Henry showed no sign of conscience in seducing village girls. Whereas I was myself so tormented with conscience – or fear – that I couldn’t give in to one. Anyway I stuck with the cannibal argument, then added what could be called the Fuegian argument, mentioning the dreaded Darwin. ‘I have never met a man without a conscience!’ my father thundered. ‘Nor a woman, and not even a child. Show me the child who does not feel a prick of conscience when he steals an extra slice of cake!’ I could have shown him Henry. Instead I returned to the charge with the Fuegians who kill strangers without compunction. I said conscience was merely instilled by a particular society, and enforced by the law. But I did not really know what I was talking about.
    That is why I am here. To answer questions which cannot even be easily asked in Christian circles in England. For example, to see for myself whether so called savages are really different from us in having a different, or no, conscience. So far the evidence is on my side. Chief Freezy who chopped his wife’s head off on the shore as a demonstration, hardly had a conscience. Or more exactly, he did not have a conscience like mine. But he seems to have had a reason. As Jeroboam put it, she might have been doing jig-a-jig with someone. In which case Freezy can be described as having a conscience of good and evil, by his lights. I wonder if anyone asked Freezy: why? At any rate he was not punished. The police from this jail did not arrest him. In this new world I am wrong on two counts: perhaps someone like Freezy does have a sort of conscience – and the law certainly does nothing to instill one. Furthermore, I know almost nothing about jig-a-jig.
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    My Superintendent, Francis Parry, is not about to let his new Constable-Detective do only guard duties while waiting for a knotty investigation to challenge his intellect. He tells me that there are 80,000 prostitutes in London, and that over 20 corpses a day float down the Thames. He challenges me to believe this. I don’t want to but he is a very credible man. The quintessential English Sergeant-Major. Which he was, in the Crimean War. He talks about Inkerman, the ‘soldiers’ battle’. In pouring rain in the dark then for a day in fog and smoke, English and Russian infantrymen fought it out hand to hand without benefit of command. They ran out of ammunition and were reduced to bayoneting each other, clubbing each other with rifle butts, braining each other with heavy stones, and strangling each other with bare hands. Parry did all these things. He also watched the magnificent charge of the Light Brigade. He says he heard its leader, Lord Cardigan, afterwards, indignantly complaining not at the folly of the charge but at the bad behaviour of the Irish officer whose message to ‘Charge for the guns’ neglected to specify which guns. This man realised the error too late and tried to call Cardigan back, but got his arm and shoulder shot off and, as Cardigan said furiously in Parry’s hearing, ‘screamed like a woman.’ Parry is not a brute, but a decent man with a faded pretty wife and grown-up sons, who build houses when there is a demand for them. He seems to have had a revelation in the Crimea that without authority and hierarchy life is a hell which leads to quick and indecent death. But he is a remarkably un-snobbish man. He is not in the least embarrassed – though in English terms my social inferior, not a gentleman etc. – to be my superior in command. Why should he be? Though he sees me frankly as a protégé of Begbie and Pemberton, I must do my apprentice work. But policing in Victoria is not an active pursuit of trouble, with regular beats and raids. The policy is to leave well alone. Most drunken brawls sort themselves out: the sawdust on the floors of the taverns (95 of