John Dunmore Lang

“ Convict labour is a species of public property, which the state has a right, and is in duty bound, to turn to the best account for the public benefit: but there can be no question as to whether convict labour can be employed more advantageously for the public in the colonies, where labour is in requisition and proportionably valuable, than in the mother country, where it is in superabundance and proportionably cheap. ”

“ But would such a measure, on the part of government, be tolerated by the labouring poor in a free country? or rather ought it to be tolerated? Would not insurrections, rick-burning, prison-breaking, martial law, and ten thousand convictions for sedition be the result? ”

“ I observe, however, in reply, that if transportation is so managed as to prove both formidable and corrective, or preventive and reformatory, which I conceive it must necessarily be under a proper system of management, it will no longer have the effect of accelerating the rate of increase of crime in England, even taking it for granted that it actually produces that effect at present. ”

“ At the same time, in a country, of whose population there are uniformly 50,000 souls and upwards in the state of convicts, either at penal settlements beyond seas, or in hulks, gaols, and penitentiaries at home, the subject of expense is not to be disregarded, especially in the present age of political economy. I maintain, therefore, that transportation, if at all rightly managed, is, of all possible modes of maintaining a convict during the period of his penal servitude, the most economical ”

“ The labour, for instance, required in the various operations implied in road-making, in a country of broken surface and hot climate—the felling of hard timber, the blasting of immense rocks, the filling up of deep cavities with stones and earth, to be carried often from a considerable distance—such labour is unquestionably hard, irksome, and formidable in the extreme. ”

“ And, if under such practice transportation has ceased in a great measure to be formidable in England, and consequently to be efficient as a means of preventing crime, the fault is not to be ascribed to the transportation system, but to a system of colonial mismanagement, which no person but the inmate of a lunatic asylum would attempt to defend. ”

“ Les peuples qui possèdent des pays dont la population ne suffit pas pour animer leur agriculture et leur commerce, et étendre ou soutenir leur iudustrie, ont un moyen de plus que les autres pour punir certains délits, et faire servir les perturbateurs de la société à Taccroissement de la richesse publique. ”

“ The steady increase of this class of criminals, constituting what Captain Basil Hall, in his evidence before the committee of the House of Commons on secondary punishments, styles "the culprit population" of the country,—criminals who form the regular inmates of its gaols and penitentiaries, and who are no sooner dismissed from one place of confinement than they find their way to another,—has been observed and deplored even in the United States of America. ”

“ Antecedently to all experience on the subject, "reason itself would teach us," to use the language of Filangieri already quoted, that it is possible to transform a bad man into a good one, by removing him from the theatre of his crimes, of his infamy, and of his condemnation:" and, unfavourable as the circumstances of the Australian penal colonies have generally been for ensuring the reformation of criminals, I am enabled to state, from my own experience and observation, that this second object of punishment has actually been attained in these colonies in many instances ”

“ The Archbishop, therefore, virtually proposes that the superintendents of convicts should underbid free labour in the home-market, and thereby take the bread out of the mouth of the free labourer, who is employed in England, perhaps, at a shilling a day ”