The Express.
London, England, 1858-03-19 00:00:00

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LONDON, FRIDAY, MARCH 19.

Tee extension glow Episcopal system, side by side
with that of oar Colonial Empire, has led to some odd
moults in the territorial designations of our Bishops in
parbbus is4deliww. ROBERT CAPE.TOMN, JAMLS
COlOll6O, THOMAS Leerae, and HMOS °SUMMED.
Toe r, figure quaintly enough in Mr. DOD'S excel-1
lent little manual. Yesterday our own columns were
favoured with a very admirable communication from
" Merrnes Pagru." 1/r. HALE, the excellent
clergyman whose personal identity is disguised
under this geographical pseudonym, is the recently
appointed Bishop of Western Australia. Having
been promoted to spiritual lordship over a diocese of
burglars and pickpockets, this earnest divine was very
laudably anxious to become familiarised as soon as
possible with the nature of the element in which
he was destined to work. At considerable
sacrifice of comfort, and, as it turned out, at no little
personal risk, the new Bishop took his passage by
the first convict ship that sailed for the scene of his
future labours. Everybody remembers with what
a touching purity of public spirit the fanny Canon
of St. Paul's used to pray for the cremation of a
home Bishop—a real " palsees-and.purple-man"—in
a first-class carriage, as the readiest means of putting
speedy end to the vexatious tyrannies of railway
directors in the early days of locomotives. Times
have improved. Manners have grown milder. People
in authority are not quite so impenetrably reason-
proof. Less shocking examples will suffice. It is
possible that the imminent peril of a Colonial Prelate
from • mutinous ship-load of convicts—even though
his life shoull be, as we trust it hu been, ultimately
spared from their violence—may induce the autho-
rities of the Home-office to cause a stricter supervi-
sion to be exercised, both over the class of convicts
selected fur transmission to Western Australia, and
the proper means of their transport in convict-ships.
Our readers will not hr.syr forgotten the long con-
troversies toac were carried on some ci.,:hteen
months back on the subject of Transportation. The
result of those controversies was, that the views
steadily maintained throughout by this Journal were
carried into effect by the Legislature. Transporta-
tion as a judicial sentence‘and a primary stage of
punishment, was finally abolished by the Penal
Servitude Act of 1857. It was left to the authori-
ties of the Home Office to select from among those
who were undergoing sentences of penal servitude
in the various convict prisons throughont the
United Kingdom, certain classes of convicts
who should be judged mast eligible for annual
transhipment in limited numbers to Western Aus-
tralia—the only colonial possession of Great Britain
to which convicts could still be sent. The test for
selection was declared to be, not the greater or less
culpability of the convict, but his greater or less
fitness for colonisation under a condition of qualified
freedom. The interest of the Colony, not the punish-
ment of the convict, was alleged to be the sole object
of the new system of Transportation, and ass general
rule those convicts alone were to be selected for the
purpose who, by a long-continued coarse of good con-
duct, had given the best earnest of ultimate reforma-
tion, and the most satisfactory proof of their fitness
for a less severe and stringent process of restriction.
Such is, and for some time before the last Act on the
subject each had been, the theory of Transportation to
Western Australia. The practice unfortunately has
been very different. The subordinate prison autho-
rities in this country, to whom the task of selection
seems to have been practically entrusted, have appa-
rently been only too glad to relieve themselves from
the presence of the most troublesome and desperate
convicts ander their charge. The worst men, and
not the best men, have been systematically shipped
off to Western Australia. The consequences are pre-
cisely what might have been anticipated. The state
of Western Australia, as developed before the Lords'
Committee of 1858, is unsatisfactory and dangerous
in the extreme. At the end of 1855 there were more
able-bodied men of the convict than of the free
class: in fact, as Dr. HALE well expresses it, " the
" colonists live, as it were, continually with a
" charged mine under their feet, and the system
" pursued by the mother-country of sending oat
" from time to time a regular supply of men rife for
" any outrage, is a system exactly suited to the pm-
" pose of springing that mine, and of bringing ruin
" and desolation on the whole country."
It might have been hoped that after the passing
of the Act of lBJi, the working of the Transportation
system would have been carried out wore conscien-
tiously. Dr. Hste's narrative leads to the conclusion
that the old abuses still prevail to the same extent
as before. The new Bishop sailed in the Nile con-
vict ship from Plymouth, on the 23rd of September,
1857. The number of convicts taken on board was
270. A large proportion of these men was of the meat
desperate character. Especially those put on board
at Portsmouth are stated se having been notoriously a
most ruffianly set. " The warder who came to the
"ship with these men said that they were about •s
" bad • body of fellows as their prison could pro-
" duce." No proper vigilance seems to have been
exercised in seeing that these desperadoes came on
board without implements of rescue or offence. A
life-preserver was discovered on one convict as he
came over the ship's side. Knives and filet were
subsequently found in possession of others. Several
implements of the kind were retained undiscovered,
and were used on the voyage as a means of getting rid
of the irons with which it became necessary for the
general safety to fetter the more dangerous of the
convicts.

So much for the selection of the men: the means
for easnring their safe custody on the voyage were,
if possible, still more inefficient. This mixed herd of