John West

“ Witnesses to the wretchedness of humble life, the squalor of its garrets and its cellars—observant that want, which sometimes forms the felon, much oftener makes the martyr, and crowds the hospital rather than the gaol—they are not incapable of pitying either class of victims. The horrors which others feel for disease, whether of the body or the mind, excite no antipathies in men who have devoted their lives to its relief: thus their government of convicts often affords a singular contrast to the agency which precedes or follows them. ”

“ Thus, at Hobart Town, men, for mere faults, have been sentenced to exposure and the scourge, in the view of hundreds: the flagellator extinguished the last feeling of the man, and roused the temper of the demon. An old compositor, within a month of his freedom, was charged with some trifling breach of convict discipline, and though the father of grown up children, was ordered by a chief police magistrate, this cruel disgrace. He is dead—and his oppressor is dead! ”

“ If the expatriated classes carry out with them their ignorance, disorder, and crime, they retard the progress and destroy the reputation of a distant country, but the nation may still be satisfied: she may balance the evil and the good, and find herself the gainer. The colony is injured; but the parent country is saved. Thus transportation not only removes the habitual criminal, it extinguishes the embers of insurrection: it prevents the dreaded war between property and poverty, and silently withdraws a mass of dangerous discontent. ”

“ A change so rapid in the relations of a people to the soil, will scarcely find a parallel in this world's history; but that banishment which, if originally contrived, had been an atrocious crime, was at last an act of mercy—the tardy humanity of Englishmen, which rescued a remnant, extenuated the dishonor of their cruelty to the race. As for Mr. Robinson, he enjoyed, not only the bounty of the government, but the affection of the natives—and the applause of all good men. ”

“ In America the powers of self-government were too often seized by a faction, and a political opposition, even in a most moderate form, was stigmatised as felony and punished as treason. But in the Australias the colonists have expended their rage on a distant office, and in their real or imaginary sufferings have felt a sympathy for each other. The ascendancy of a faction in a small community is the reign of terror, and might soon lead those who value their personal freedom to regret the most sensitive and unscrupulous vice-regal despotism. ”

“ Let no one imagine, that men are effectually intimidated by attending public executions: as the fatal moment draws nigh, crowds are indeed seen rushing towards the spot; but they wear the lineaments of insensibility, intemperance, or habitual crime. It is not the guilt of the sufferer which extinguishes their pity: they would run to witness the murder of a saint. The utility of executions is left to the judgment of statesmen, but it cannot be wrong to detest them. ”

“ The local rulers, instructed by their superiors, have long permitted even the licentiousness of the press. The strength of the empire justified and accounted for its tolerance. There is no tyranny so watchful as that of fear, and no cruelty so relentless as that of factions who struggle for existence.
The non-dependence of the government on the people has united the colonists in one body. It has been the colony against England, and not tories against whigs. ”

“ The mother rushes forward; sees a black boy fleeing in the distance, and then beholds the victim of his malice: she draws forth the spear, and her child is dead.
The settler, now grown rich by his flocks and tillage, looks forward to the enjoyment of his opulence in domestic happiness. The companion of his early labors and privations forms the chief object in the picture; but while he was dreaming of future bliss, the envious eye of a savage, which had recognised in that prosperous homestead a station of his fathers, had glanced over and blighted all. ”

“ It is not improbable that colonisation would have commenced at a much earlier date: the first ships of free settlers would have been more intelligent; their attention to the resources of the country more earnest. The second quarter of a century had half expired, when the Blue Mountains ceased to be a barrier to the colonists of New South Wales. The dawning of a new world must have attracted the national mind, had not an unexampled society, abandoned to vice and crime, appeared to the people an object of dread and horror. ”

“ For a word, or a look, the felon was brought to the triangle; but when he shot down the native, and acquired distinction by his butcheries, justice became scrupulous: the laws were silent—religion and humanity were silent; and the fallen black, like the uprooted forest, was thought of as an encumbrance removed!
The state of the census was equally reprehensible: England not only forgot the prescriptions of nature, and formed communities of men, but the inevitable consequence to the natives was utterly neglected. ”

“ The body bends and goes through hours of ineffectual motion; or if the rigour of discipline renders evasion penal, the triangles disgrace a civilised nation, and the colony is filled with violence and vengeance. Yet convict labor has, generally, been deemed important to an infant settlement; to secure a combination, without which preliminary stages of colonisation are slowly passed. Such has been its undoubted use; but who, with the prodigies of modern enterprise before him, will assign to bond labor a peculiar efficacy, or doubt that well directed capital can ensure all that force can effect. ”

“ The administration of the criminal laws, both in Great Britain and the colonies, presents a series of alternations between rigour and laxity, which have proceeded from the alternate ascendancy of conflicting ideas, that can never settle into harmony.
Maconochie delighted to trace the better qualities of prisoners: how even the most daring are moved by tenderness, and when kindly spoken to, melt into tears. Unhappily these characteristics too often exist in combination with passions which render them useless. ”

“ Hostile traditions cannot be naturalised in a new land: all respectable men condemn the revival of ancient feuds, and they will soon disappear for ever.
More fortunate in this respect than America, in these regions no African slavery exists—the brother will not sell his sister, or the father his son. The temporary inconvenience of transportation will leave no deep indent on colonial society; but the black brand of slavery is indelible. ”

“ The love of order is too strong in the English breast to tolerate anarchy, and whatever changes transpire the public voice would pronounce in favor of a strong and regular administration. But since life is short, no wise man would wish to waste a considerable portion in passing through the disorders of a revolution to gain the mere name of a State. The royal government may redress every grievance, and the colonist may turn with confidence to the seat of empire for the accomplishment of every municipal change requisite to advance the country of his adoption. ”

“ The substantial benevolence of many employers is not the less unquestionable: a large number continued their liberated men in their service, whom they had taught the arts of industry, brought under the influence of moral instruction, and assisted to settle in life. Hundreds scattered throughout these colonies, who were born in the contagion of wickedness, were rescued from habits of crime by the long and patient training of their masters. That many such have become virtuous, in the highest sense, could not be affirmed without hazard; but can this be said of the majority of mankind? ”

“ The reformation of adults may admit of scepticism, and be tolerated as a topic of ridicule: but children, taught to steal earlier than to speak; who received the first lessons of crime on the lap of a mother; who never heard of God, but from the lips of blasphemers—or of right, but as the fair distribution of spoil, were surely entitled to compassion. The sympathies of man cast penal science to the winds, and scorn to preserve the inexorable temper of legal vengeance, to save the rich from peculation, by the moral immolation of infant robbers. They are orphans cast upon a nation's mercy ”

“ A settler who bought his land from the government, finds in his neighbourhood ninety convicts, in the charge of a single overseer. His property, and it is impossible it should be otherwise, is subjected to daily depredation. And who is the real robber? Who, at least, are the more accountable parties? The men whose known propensities have occasioned their transportation—the unfortunate overseer, whose life hangs upon his connivance or indifference—or the government, which, knowing all these circumstances, exposed the men to temptation, and the settler to ruin? ”

“ A wise administration of local patronage, without distinctions which are unnatural and absurd, would strengthen the hands of the executive and satisfy the reason of the people.
The future independence of the Australian colonies is written in the book of fate; but the inevitable change may be long postponed with advantage to themselves. A superior power is desirable to regulate their development, and to preserve at once their order and their freedom. The reins of government, if snatched from vice-regal hands, would not immediately fall into those more worthy. ”

“ While some exhibit a convict colony as depraved beyond all examples of depravation, others lower the standard of human virtue, and not only extenuate its evils but magnify its worth. It was asserted by Lord Stanley, that the feeling of caste guarded the habits of the free. A view so flattering to human pride could hardly fail to be confessed; but, in fact, familiarity with crime, although it may not corrupt the judgment, must abate the moral sensibility. ”

“ May the lesson of his sufferings become the shield of his race! Those who impute guilt to this colony, forget that its worst members are not stationary, and that many have borne away their guilt with their persons. That Being, who makes requisition for blood, will find it in the skirts of the murderer, and not on the land he disdained.
No man can witness the triumph of colonisation, when cities rise in the desert, and the wilderness blossoms as the rose, without being gladdened by the change ”

“ Kemp, of Mount Vernon at the mess at the Macquarie Hotel, "you see a sample before you, of what this colony can produce, which we are now, one and all, making an unanimous effort to insure the enjoyment of in peace and comfort: if, when not only the necessaries, but many of the luxuries of life are thus bountifully supplied us, we are not loyal, we shall never be loyal. ”

“ Ministers of the crown are, or profess to be, astonished that when the freed population increases, and the territory is explored, a country, still needing labor, should object to the prisoner supply; but the slave-holding interest expires, when immense numbers can be held no longer by a few: the common views of mankind re-assert their ascendancy. All, save employers, are hostile to degraded labor; employers themselves become less interested as masters than as colonists. ”

“ Under such a plan the emigrant is gradually superseded by the exile population: the emancipated laborer is expelled by a fresh ticket holder. The country-born youth finds himself unable to live in his native land. The tone of public morals follows the prevailing spirit: crime is currently spoken of merely as a fault or a misfortune; the press teams with vicious sentimentalism; the administration of justice becomes more uncertain, perjury more common; the reputation of the colony is formed from the census, and the land becomes a by-word and a hissing. ”

“ It was rendered uniform, by the imperial confidence reposed in his judgment; more so by the demand for labor, by the rapid influx of capital, and by the common interest of the government, the colonist, and the well-doing prisoner. It would be difficult to find half that period undisturbed under any other ruler.
Many difficulties connected with transportation are created by natural and social laws: full of mercy to the human race. The sufferings inflicted by man cannot reform man: he cannot carry out the vengeance of another, for wrongs he neither endured nor saw. ”

“ The advice to a person accused to plead not guilty, though anomalous in its aspect, is yet usually a proper protection to the ignorant and defenceless: such, under an impression of general guilt, might admit an aggravated indictment, and lose the advantage of those distinctions made by legislators on public grounds, between crime and crime; or the executive might delude a prisoner with fallacious hopes of mercy, to prevent the disclosure of extenuating facts to conceal official wrong; while ignorance of the details of a crime, might destroy the moral weight of exemplary punishment. ”

“ The districts of the city occupied by the better class of society, seemed but a small portion of the metropolis—like islands in a sea of vice and destitution. There were numerous places of savage amusement and small gambling houses; and young men of family, hanging loose on the world, not unfrequently became amateur adventurers in crime. The populace felt no aversion to a highwayman of spirit. The pursuit of criminals became a voluntary and profitable calling, and offenders against the laws were encouraged and sheltered, until they were ripe for the executioner. ”

“ No army ever departed from their homes less agitated by the uncertainties of the future; and notwithstanding the dreary picture of the service, drawn by the colonel commanding, there was no danger that a bridge of Lodi, or a plain of Waterloo, would be found in the campaign. Some went out with the keenness of sportsmen who might at least catch a kangaroo: others were contented to live moderately well at government charge. The clerks, released from their offices, gladly embraced a holiday: the poor prisoner acted and felt as a free man, and rejoiced in the interval of his servitude ”

“ Thus far the government was remiss and culpable. The crimes of individuals, without diminishing their guilt, must be traced to those general causes, which are subject to the disposal of statesmen and legislators.
But when the colony was planted, and the people spread abroad, it was the duty of the crown to protect its subjects of every class: it was the duty of its officers to arrest the arm of the black man, however great the provocation that raised it. They could not stand by to investigate causes ”