John Dunmore Lang

“ Watt, who was then sole manager in the Gazette Office, got intelligence of the circumstance; and being desirous of having the proprietors of the Herald, who were reputable free emigrants, subjected to an action for libel;—a course, which, in a colony abounding in needy and rapacious lawyers, is not unfrequently resorted to by artful villany and conscious worthlessness, as an approved instrument of torture for honest men,—bribed an emancipated convict compositor in the Herald Office to steal for him a proof or printed copy of the suppressed article ”

“ In the course of his defence in the Supreme Court, Watt had made an outrageous attack on a magistrate of the territory who was in no way connected with the affair: for this outrage he was called to account before the Sydney bench of magistrates, to whose summary jurisdiction he was amenable, as a convict holding a ticket of leave. The outrage, it appeared, was not punishable; but various other charges being exhibited against Watt, the magistrates determined to enter into them at length. ”

“ Now, that a criminal like Watt, who ought unquestionably to have been doomed for a long period to hard labour and solitary confinement, should have been allowed to occupy a station of such commanding influence, as that individual attained so very lately in the penal colony of New South Wales, even during the period of his sentence of transportation,—subjecting the characters of various officers of His Majesty's Government to general suspicion, from alleged connivance at his delinquencies ”