The Express.
London, England, 1846-11-28 00:00:00

' tion to abolish the punishment of transportation 1
altogether.
It is certainly much to be desired that her Ma-
jesty's councillors may be endowed with sufficient
resolution to undertake the abolition of our system
of transportation. It has not only entirely failed as
a system of scondary punishment, but been the means
of increasing natural and acquired depravity in
individuals to a degree of inveteracy unknown be-
fore; of planting the full-blown professional crime of
complex and artificial society among savages and
infant colonies. It has been a costly instrument of
evil. From the foundation of the settlement of New
South Wales in 1787 to 1836 there were sent to that
colony and Van Diemen's Land, 78,000 con-
victs. The military and convict services alone
of these two colonies, " as far as the same
has appeared in the accounts," from 1788 to
1836, amounted to about five millions. This
is but part of an expenditure, the items and total
of which it is impossible to ascertain. And all this
outlay has literally been incurred in order to make
bad men worse, to impart to the savages of Australia
and Oceania a precocious acquaintance with the
refined vices of civilisation, to poison at its source
the morality of New South Wales, and to render the
seas and shores of the Pacific unsafe for single mer-
chant vessels. Nor have the outlay and the evils in-
flicted on remote regions been compensated by any
visible improvement in the tone of public morals
at home, or by any diminution of crime that can
at all be traced to transportation.
Our English system of penal transportation may be
said to date from the last century—under the modified
4,
form in which the present general:um lmowit. laglip •• " i i •
of filussirru transportation is mentioned am a • ~, Itec -
. e
ment in an Act of the legislature ; and an
CHARLES 11. authorises jtulges to exile • ,
troopers of
teat4tillonbelsliali "14" th
aoiea. 0 ,-:
under these acts ma nsisted only of exile to a particular '
place, and did not embrace compulsory labour there.
From the writings of DE FOE, and other sources, it
would appear that a practice of combining compul-
sory labour with exile had been irregularly gaining
ground in his time : the first statute, however, which
warrants the employment of transported offenders as
slaves, is the 4th osoncs 1., c. 11, which gave to
the person who contracted to transport them (" his
heirs, successors, and assigns"), a property and inte-
rest in their services for the period of their sentences.
Several of the colonies, among others Ilutadoes,
Maryland, and New York, testified their disinclina-
tion to have their want of labour thus supplied ; but
the law continued to be acted upon till the
war of independence placed it out of the power of
the mother country to vomit forth her moral nuisances
into the new states, and rendered it inadvisable to
insult the loyal colonies by making them receptacles
for its surplus crime.
It was about this time that a new colony was
planted to receive our felon slaves, or more correctly
our felon slaves were sent out to a region previously
untenanted by civilised man, in the hope that specu-
lators might be induced to follow with the prospect of
growing rich upon their labour. From the beginning
this mode of punishing by consigning to slavery was
in every point of view objectionable. It was au in-
fliction ill calculated to deter from criminal acts. The
convict was withdrawn from the public eye : what he
suffered was unknown : it made no distinct or tangible
impression upon the minds of those tempted as ho
had been. They could not realise its terrors. It
was an infliction ill calculated to reform the vicious.
It produced upon masters and slaves all the bad
effects known to have resulted from negro slavery,
with this addition, that the white slaves being all of
the felon class, the tone of social morality was in
their case rendered still lower and more gross. Even
the comparative driblets of convicts annually sent to
our American possessions, to be absorbed into an
honest and hard-working community preciously
existing there, had the effect of visibly lowering the
moral tone, and adding to the insecurity of society. But
in the Australian penal colonies the felons (with the ex-
ception of their guards) constituted at first the only so-
ciety of the settlements, and fora long time the majority.
There have been governors in New South Wales
who regarded the convicts and emancipiats as the
only rightful occupants of the soil, and the
honest men as intruders. In this anomalous
society, crime was the rule, respect for the law
the exception. The effect of the modified sys-
tem of transportation introduced under the Act
24th GEORGE 111. c. 56, and the Orders in Council of
the 6th and 30th of December, 1786, was, to relegate
criminals to a region so wide and full of lurking
places, that effective superintendence and control on
the part of their keepers was impossible ; and so re-
mote from the observation of well-regulated society,
that all shyness in the presence of virtue, and
all fear of its disapprobation became extinct.
Accordingly, in 1838, after a trial of half a century,
a committee of the House of Commons, which had
been tasked to listen to a voluminous evidence unpa-
ralleled in the annals of moral loathsomeness, re-
ported :
Your committee consider that they have automated the moat un-
queationable proofs that the two main charaeterintica oftransportution,
:teamagrtouLtie"reno!l:rtn. oitlenfikreif'onileiiini:, but in TtillfurriTerccriomrr'o..,.prng
time who undergo the punbohnont ; that thew qualities ofinefficioncy
for good and efficient, for evil, are inherent In the cyonetn, which in
therefore not suoiceptahle of any ratiafactory Improvement ; and lastly
that there belongs to the syntem, extrinsically from ito strange cha-
racter us a punishment, the yet ruorecurtous and monstrous evil of
calling into indigence, and continually extending, societien, or the
germs or IlatioliA, 1111.11. t thoroughly depraved as respect, both the cha-
racter and degree of their vocluasinyoiconeities.
The subsequent history of our transportation sys-
tem deserves to be considered apart. It is another
melancholy instance of the bad effects of that moral
cowardice which makes legislators and governments
mutilate and weaken wholesome measures, to evade
the censure of the unreasoning vulgar (both in high
and low station), invariably hostile to everything to
which they are unaccustomed.

THE opinions of the Times are, on many subjects,
rather peculiar: on no subject are they more so thaa
on what constitutes fairness in public discussion. The
revulsion of the railway mania last year was attended
by great and angry. excitement. To universal confi-
dence succeeded universal suspicion. Allottees looked
upon provisional committeemen as decoys; provi-
sional committeemen upon allottees as dishonest
repudiators; and the (not very numerous) uncompro.
mised public regarded both parties as diamond-cut-
diamonds. Fierce and clamorous was the recrimina-
tion. At the very height of the excitement, actions
between many of these parties, arising out of relations
previously unknown to the legal or commercial busi-
ness of the country, came to be tried in our courts of
justice. Judges and juries were called upon to deeide
in cases where there was neither statute nor precedent
to guide them, while exposed to the contagious in-
fluence of the fierce partisan spirit abroad. Under
such circumstances most journalists would have felt,
that common honesty and common decency required
them to abstain from seeking to bias the minds of
men called to discharge such a delicate responsible
office at so untoward a period. Not so the Times.
that journal thought and thinks, " It was necessary
that we should express some opinion, and we did so at
the earliest moment and without reservation."
Influenced partly by the epidemic partisanship of
the moment, and partly, there can be little doubt, by
the inflammatory appeals and reckless exaggerated
statements of the Times, verdicts were obtained from
juries, of the legality of which strong doubts were
entertained by a majority of the judges of the court,
in which the cases were tried. :Motions for new trials
have been made, and these cases remitted for
the consideration of other juries, with clear and
weighty explanations from the Bench of the miscon-
ceptions which led the former juries into error. An
appeal was thus made "from Pntur drunk to l'inur
sober "—from the public (speaking through the legi-
timate channel of the jury-box), in a state of panic
irritation, to the public in a tranquil and impar-
tial mood. In sanctioning this appeal, however, the
luckless Barons of the Exchequer have been guilty of
fiat rebellion against the Times, and all the vials of
its wrath are poured upon their head. It is admitted
that they possess "vast intellectual powers," that
they possess "a large amount of public confidence,"
4
but these virtues have unfortunately only tempted
them to " forget there is such a thing
.q. s9p ill
opinion "—that is, the opinion of the Tisbsp.; -,K
Barons have decided to favour of the,
1 sional committeemen, and " our ope..,— ice' -' -
against the provisional committeeme h'Thi
hia
Judges have dared to differ in opinion with a Tarn
which forthwith bewails their " fall," w 'it cha—
ritably imputes to pride, and the desire tii"
_wing a
flight above the range of modest mecli i ••-#"—the
range of the Times. They are sarcastically reminded
that " it is wiser for all men, especially for judge',
to keep the general level''—the level of the Times.
The Times does not condescend to argue the ques-
tion on grounds of law and equity. It announces
that " our opinion was against the provisional com-