The Sun.
London, England, 1853-05-11 00:00:00

liberate reason I Did a man pick a pocket because,
after due consideration, he had come to the decision
that he ought to do so ? Crimes were generally com-
mitted because those who committed them did not
reason, and, not reasoning, did not possess sufficient
strength of mind to resist temptation. Were these the
men, then, to commit crime for the sake of being trans-
ported, in order that, at the end of 10, or 12, or 15
years, after undergoing a punishment of awful severity,
they might be at liberty to take their chance with other
scramblers for gold at the diggings ? The notion was
so utterly irrational that he (Earl Grey) was convinced
that no noble lord would attempt to assert it. He did
not deny that there might be men who had given
as a reason for their crimes that they wanted to go to
the digging. He knew that in 1830 he had had letters
from criminals stating that they had committed
crimes for the purpose of being transported. There
were not wanting in the records of our criminal courts
cases of persons who had incurred the penalty, even of
death, from a morbid desire to undergo punishment.
But taking mankind as a body, he believed that tran-
sportation as it had lately been inflicted, contained more
that was alarming to 99 men out of 100 than any other
punishment. One reason for this was that it contained,
he might say, many different elements. But it was not
merely the difficulty of obtaining employment, which
was obviated by the present system of emigration : a
sudden return to unrestrained liberty was also prevented.
Experience had shown that a sudden change from strict
control to unrestrained freedom was more than a man
could bear. It was even so in the colonies, and thus it
was that the system of sending out men with conditional
pardons was changed. When the convicts had condi-
tional pardons it was found thai; they speedily relapsed
into former idle and disorderly habits. The system of
assignment was then adopted and persevered in until
disapproved by the House of Commons. The system of
granting tickets of leave was then adopted. Under this
system the effect had been very gratifying. The papers
upon their lordships' table would show that the convicts
had in many instances set examples which might well be
followed by free labourers. In the case of a convict
who had committed a very serious offence, one who had
barely escaped capital punishment, through the Secre-
tary of State commuting it to transportation for life, it
might be quite safe to release him at the end of four or
five years, if he were removed to a distant colony, and there
Placed under restrictions still tolerably severe, though a
great improvement on his former condition, and though
he must pay a considerable sum of money, and do a con-
siderable amount of work before he could obtain a con-
ditional pardon. Such a man, who had committed a
crime which was only distinguished by a nice shade from
murder, might, under such conditions, be safely re•-
leased, after four or five years, from Portland ; but what
would be the effect if, after those four or five years of
seclusion, he were allowed to go back to his old com-
rades, and say : "See what I have done ; I knocked out
the brains of the keeper of the prison," or, "I have been
a notorious housebreaker for ten years ; and, after four
or five years, which I don't much care about (for that
was always the language they held), here I am back
again. Don't be afraid of the sentence of the law ; that
is the worst it can do. Join with me, and we will break
open another house." (Hear, hear.) To allow men of
this kind to return to their old haunts would destroy all
reformatory discipline. No one who knew anything at
all of the criminal law would believe that this would be
safe. But what was the alternative ? To prolong the
period of punishment. (Hear, hear.) But precisely as
they prolonged that period, precisely as they made very
distant the period when good conduct would procure a
release—precisely in the same degree did they diminish
the influence of that hope which was now the main in-
strument of Government in leading convicts to behave
well in our prisons at home. If a man was told that,
let him behave ever so well, he must continue in that
gloomy retreat for ten or twelve years, it was greatly to
be feared that the hope of accelerating the period of his
discharge would lose its effect, and that he would not
think it worth while to exert himself in the hope of
knocking off one or two days at the end of that period,
and that he might as well be guilty of some breach of
discipline, and enjoy himself as he could while in pri-
son. To prolong the period of prison discipline would
cut off the main source whence its excellence was de-
rived, and would render the hope now excited in the
minds of the convicts comparatively null. He assumed
that it would be argued, by those who opposed his
motion, not that transportation was otherwise than useful
in itself and beneficial, but that it must of necessity be
given up—that it was impracticable to remove from this
country the hundreds of convicts who were now, looking.
forward to transportation. He denied the validity of
that argument. If they were to abandon transportation,
because Van Diemen's Land could not be called on longer
to receive convicts, and there was no other place to which
they could be sent, the Government ought to have taken
the course which was adopted by their predecessors. As
far as his informatien went, he was not aware of any
sufficient reason for abandoning the practice of removing
convicts to Van Diemen's Land ; but, for the sake of ar-
gument, he would concede that it must be abandoned.
Granting that this was so, what was the proper course ?
He found no fault with the dispatch written by the late
Colonial Secretary, who said he thought that transpor-
tation to Van Diemen's Land ought to stop, but that
Government could not fix the precise date of the change.
(Hear.) The late Government proposed to submit cer-
tain changes in the law, which they thought necessary
in order to effect this alteration in the practice, and at
the same time to make certain arrangements by which
they thought these alterations might be accomplished
without injury. (Hear.) That was a perfectly legiti-
mate course, and had it been adhered to by the present
Government, it would have been perfectly practicable,
by arrangements which might have been made, and
changes in the law which might have been proposed—
not certainly without considerable expense—to put
an end, at no distant period, to transportation to
Van Diemen's Land, and at the same time to
maintain that punishment to an extent sufficient to
answer the most important purposes. (Hear, hear.)
Look at the present condition of Van Diemen's Land:
The colony was wealthy far beyond any other colony
ever founded in the world, he believed, in proportion to
its size. It possessed many of the advantages of an old
country—neat farm-houses, hawthorn hedges, good
grounds, all the means of civilised life, a perfect police,
the most perfect safety—greater than we enjoyed in this
country—from offences. All this comfort and wealth,
all this fortunate and prosperous state of things, had
been created exclusively by the enormous expenditure of
this country. (Hear.) Was it, then, just or reasonable
that, precisely at the moment when Van Diemen'a Land
could receive convicts with most advantage to itself, as
well as to the mother country—when the colonists had
derived so much benefit from convict labour and convict
expenditure—they should turn round on the mother
country and say—" We will not only not tolerate receiv-
ing convicts, but we will not even give you time in
making the change, to consult Parliament or to adopt
any other plan to relieve you from the great inconveni-
ence which the change must occasion ?" But he be-.
lieved that Van Diemen's Land would have been per-
fectly satisfied with the promise given by the late Go-
vernment. They might have done all that had been
done, and at the same time have avoided the embarrass-
ment that had ensued ; but was it certain that this was
the deliberate and settled opinion of the community, and
not merely clamour ? Though a clamour were loud, it
did not follow that it was reasonable ; of this there had
been instances in the present day. As far as we had the
means of judging, there was every indication that this
opinion against convicts was not adopted on sound reason
and adequate grounds. In the first place, the cry was
quite new. It was unheard of when he began to attend
to the subject; and he was one of these who were most
anxious to put an end to transportation as it had been here-
tofore conducted, for the purpose of arriving at the very
plan which had been lately in operation ; because, with-
out giving himself credit for superior discernment, he
might state that nearly twenty years ago he had ex-
pressed an opinion in favour of such a plan. There were
colonists and newspapers as rabid then on the other side
as they were now. They were as ready then to denounce
as enemies of their country any one that should venture
to suggest the possibility of their being any abuses in
the existing system of transportation. He held in his
hand an extract from the report of a committee of the
legislative council of New South Wales which sat on the
subject in 1846 ; and it seemed to be the theory of that
committee that people at home ought to commit crimes
in order that there might be plenty of labour in the
colonies ; for they came to a resolution to the effect that
not fewer than 5,000 male convicts should be annually
transported to New South Wales. Nor was the com-
mittee at all apprehensive that any moral evil of any
sort or kind would follow the importation into the
colony of so large a number of convicts, because they
argued that the free population had obtained so great a
head and mastery over the convict population that if the
proposal was carried out, the vast absorbing and dis-
persing powers of the colony would prevent the convicts
from ever swamping the free- population as they had
done in Van Diemen's Land. Thus they would see
theth
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on
resase oe f aof
truec oilt cos
that the committee agreed with him in thinking that
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the
htlhet
report in 1847 ; but it was remarkable to observe of
that the °e prencpceoui
this committee was composed. Its chair whom
man
was Mr.
Wentworth, now the oracle of the other side ; and another
of its leading members was Mr. Lowe, who was also
now a determined opponent of transportation. Yet Sir
Charles Wentworth stated that up o the end of the
session of 1848, since which time te t
cer-
tainly not become worse, but better, these gentlemen
had
gentlemen
professed their unreserved concurrence in the report of
the committee. In that year, too, the legislative
deliberately came to a resolution, requesting
coun-
convicts should again be sent to them. tmore
thang
that
this. The present chairman of the Anti-Convict League
was one Mr. Cooper, and he (the noble earl) found from
e
the colonial newspapers that this same gentleman was a
member of an association which was formed in 1846 by
the settlers in Port Philip, for the purpose of raising
money to defray the expense of importing " expirees"---
that was, not persons who had undergone the improved
system of convict discipline, but those who had composed
the probation gangs in Van Diemen's Land at a time
when their discipline was notoriously bad. (Hear, hear.)
Again, he found that at the present time a very large
number of the most respectable and intelligent settlers in
Van Diemen's Land had signed a petition, praying that
the system might be continued. He believed it was not
upon the table of the house, but he bad seen it in a co-
lonial newspaper, and he had no doubt as to its authen-
ticity. At the same time, ho was far from denying that
there were many persons in the colonies who entertained
a very sincere opinion against transportation ; but he
thought the circumstances he had mentioned showed that
the opinion bad not been very deliberately or very soberly
formed. On the contrary, he believed that it might be
mainly traced to the language which had been held in this
country. People here talked about "the disgraceful penal
colonies," and that had prevented emigration to Van
Diemen's Land until the colonists had begun to feel it.
The colonists were very sensitive about what war said