The Sun.
London, England, 1857-01-09 00:00:00

TICKET-OF-LEAVB SYSTEM.

Colonel Jebb is a first-rate statist. He has the
right figures, and he reasons admirably upon them.
His letter in our paper of yesterday is a model for
any country the population of whichis entirely
under the dominion of reason, the climate of which
secures it from nervous complaints, and where even
the robbers and murderers—if there are any—take
in blue-books, and amuse themselves with decimal
sums is criminal arithmetic. The Colonel, how-
ever, makes soma admissions not at all of a nature
to reassure the old ladies, or even the old gentle-
men, who now lie listening for " noises" till two
o'clock in the morning, His first admission is,
that under the existing acts there can be no pos-
sible alteration of the practice. He leaves us no
loophole. It is all according to law. No doubt,
be intimates, judges and magistrates are very un-
discriminating, and sometimes pass very light sen-
tences on atrocious offenders. The law, however,
cannot undertake the office of the judge. It can
only deal with the sentence ; and if the same sen-
tence has been passed on the wretched pilferer of
a few pounds of bacon and the deliberate perpe-
trator of the most horrible outrages, the law, says
Colonel Jebb, interferes at the same period, and
restores them both to society. So far, however,
from the practice being an innovation on the side
of lenity, it is much more severe than the pre •
vious one ; at least, by the testimony of the
criminals themselves, who, the Colonel informs
us, would much rather be sent to Australia
at the end of four years' imprisonment in this
country than set at large in their own dear country
after two years and a half. The chaplain, he say.,
has nothing to do with it. The only condition re-
quired by the act is a certain amount of good be-
haviour. In the department of criminal science it
appears that the moral scale is graduated with an
accuracy which removes all doubt between the
convict and his keepers. The former sees the scale,
and knows hotr to act up to its requirements.
The Home-office, the visiting magistrates, and all
the authorities concerned see at once when the

requisite degree of morality has been attained:
shutting their eyes to all "antecedents," to the
peculiar circumstances under which their hopeful
protege came under their care, and despising the
vulgar belief that a man who has done certain
things is sure to do them again, they give him his
liberty, leaving society to take care of itself. It's

all quite regular, says the Colonel, and he pro-
nounces it good. So, of course, we are not sur-
prised at the further aggravation of the present
state of things that, in the Colonel's opinion, there
can be no immediate improvement upon it.
Very well ; as, according to the Colonel, there
is not sufficient discrimination, or rather none at
all, except between what nurserymaids call the
" behaviour" of this convict or that, neither of
them having a very wide scope within the bur
walls of a gaol ; as the chaplain has not oven the
opportunity of discriminating; as the sentences are
very undiscriminatory; as the Home-office does not
venture to discriminate • and as the system is
simply a machine by which convicts of all sorts and
sizes come in at one end and re-appear at the other
in the uniform shape of ticket-of-leave people, we
cannot be very wide of the mark if we suggest that
some further attempt he made towards a better
discrimination, and consequent classification. If
we are to deal with all convicts in the same way,
then we can understand the present system may
meet a great variety of cases as well as any one
other. With more discrimination, however, we
may attempt different methods of treatment. There
clearly are those of whose reform we may entertain
some reasonable hope, and as clearly there are
others who are either irreclaimable or too dangerous
to be set at large. We don't see why the personal
question—for it is a personal question—may not
decided while the man is in prison, and upon va-
rious considerations. For example, we mu,t say, in
the present state of society, considering the mutual
confidence in which we all dwell, and the way in
which we leave ourselves at the mercy of violence,
we have a very great reluctance to see men con-
victed of gross personal outrages thrown again on
the public, except after the utmost possible ordeal.
But, assuming certain less desperate or less for-
midable classes, surely we have not yet exhausted
the desert shores, the outlying and inhospitable
regions of the earth, where these men might spend
the rest of their lives in such labours and under
such a system as the site and the community
would allows It need not he a paradise ; as little
need it be a hell ; but to a moderate purgatory we
have no objection. The chief point, of course, would
be that there should be no escape, and an impassa-
ble gulf between it and the more attractive colonies.
Nature itself has adapted New Holland for the
purpose, and left two of its shores as remote and
inaccessible as could be required for such an object.
For more desperate offenders, for those whose ten-
dencies are positively formidable, and whose
amendment it is folly to hope for, there remains
the last resource of perpetual and hopeless impri-
sonment at home. Such persons, seeing that
humanity does not permit penal hunger and mace-
ration, may as well be employed on public works,
such as those of Portland. The colonel himself
observes that there is plenty of this sort of work
to be done, and rather a want of convict labour
for the purpose. Indeed, this is about the only
suggestion of practical value in his letter, and as
soon as Parliament meets we trust that every ticket-
of-leave man caught at his old tricks may reap the
benefit of it.—Times.

COLONIAL REPRESENTATIVE COVERNMENT.

(From the Ttmee.)

Till within a very few years no product of Eng-
land appeared so impossible to transport across
the seas as her responsible government. The great
Republic which has sprung from our American
colonies has developed our love of liberty,
our respect for individual rights, and our de-
ference to public opinion, but has never been
able to appropriate to herself the Eng-
lish executive. In every State, as well as in
the Central Legislature, the chief magististe is
elected for a definite period, and the Ministers of
the Federal Government are excluded from seats
in the Legislature, and may retain office, although
thoy.and their opinions are in a decided minority.
The notion of a responsible Government holding
office so long as it retained the confidence of the
Legislative Assembly has for the first time in the
present year been brought into practice in the
Australian colonies. Educated hitherto under a
system of political tutelage, with one-third of their
members nominated by the Crown, and consisting
partly of officials whom no possible success of oppo-
sition could displace, the Australian Assemblies
had but little experience of the theory or practice
of constitutional government. How matters are
to proceed in Victoria we do not know, for the
elections are not yet concluded ; but we have had
a notable specimen of the turbulent infancy of re-
sponsible government in New South Wales. The
spring of last year was occupied in that colony by
an election of members to serve in the Lower House.
The electoral districts in the colony were said at
the time of passing the act under which it received
its constitution to have been framed with great
inequality, and from this cause, or from some
other of which our accounts do not inform us, par-
ties appear to have been nearly equally ba:anced.
The Governor, Sir Wm. Denison—whose conduct
throughout the whole of these complicated transac-
tions appears, so far as we have the means of judg-
ing, to have been extremely judicious and impar-
tial—first devolved the task of forming a Go-
vernment of Mr. Thompson, the Colonial Secretary
under the old regime. On the failure of this gen-
tleman the duty was entrusted to Mr. Donaldson,
a merchant and settler, who succeeded, though
with great difficulty, in forming a Ministry. This
Government seems to have been formed of Con-
servative elements, and to have been suspected at
least of an intention to maintain the claims of the
present occupants of Crown lands in all their in-
tegrity. However, the Government obtained a
majority, but• a majority so small that in Angus'
last they resigned because they did not receive
that amount of support to which they believed
themselves entitled. Sir William Denison then
summoned to his Councils Mr. Cowper, the leader
of the Opposition, who formed a Government, lost
•was driven to select his Attorney-General from
among the solicitors instead of the bar, theme be-
ing, as it appears, the same line of demarcation
between the two branches of the profession there
as in England. The bar, of course, were indignant
at such a slight, and personal objections seem to
have existed against the new Attorney-General of
more force than his belonging to the wrong branch
of the legal hierarchy. When this Ministry met
the House a vote of censure was moved upon them,
mainly levelled at this obnoxious Attorney General
and carried by a majority of 2. Mr. Cowper and
his colleagues thereupon resigned, and the scale,
which had inclined for the moment in favour of the
Liberals, once more favoured the Conservatives. By
the last accounts a new Ministry was formed by
Mr. Parker a gentleman whose fame, whatever
it may be, has not yet penetrated these northern
regions.

-We have been thus particular in narrating these
events, because, as it is of great importance to truth
that the difficulties of responsible government
should be extenuated, so it is of equal consequence
to the future well government of our colonies that
they should not be exaggerated or misrepresented.
It is very easy to raise out of these frequent, almost
theatricai, changes of Ministers and Ministries a
cry that the colonies are unfit for self-government..
For our own part we see nothing in what has hap-
pened in New South Wales which might not per-

fectly well have happened in England itself, always
excepting the sensitiveness of a Prime Minister
who resigns office while he has got a working
majority of two, and the nomination of Attorney-
General selected from the roll of solicitors. It is
nothing new in this country for parties to be nearly
balanced or Ministries to be shortlived. Nor is
the conflict, as has been represented, one merely for
place and power. There is a vast prize at stake—
no less than the unsold lands of the colony, which
the one party wish to retain in the hands of the
present occupants at nominal rents, and the other
eo throw open to purchase. The minority claim to
represent the larger portion of the people of the
colony, and only to be outvoted by an unfair division
of the electoral districts. The struggle must con-
tinue till victory decides for one side or the
other ; and instead of cavilling at its course, we
ought to rejoice that we have provided our colo-
nists with an arena on which to fight out their
local differences by argument and reason, instead
of having recourse to those explosions of fury and
discord which are apt to agitate those communities
for whose passions a similar safety-valve is not
provided.
Responsible government can do great things, but
it cannot beforehand ascertain the relative force of
parties, nor discern without trial the fittest men to
conduct the government, nor remedy by its own
innate force the faulty distribution of electoral
power ; but there is no reason to doubt that in
Australia, as elsewhere, the effect of responsible
government, when time has been given it to attain
its full development, will prove the same blessing
that it has been in England and in Ca' tda. We
must beware of copying the impatience of many
well-meaning persons in 1848, who, because their
new institutions did not at once regenerate nations
utterly unaccustomed to think and act for them-
selves, and restore a prosperity undermined bycenturies of misgovernment, believed their aspira-
tions after liberty a dream, and sank back into their
old lethargy. A remembrance of the struggles and
blunders, the crimes and absurdities, through
which England floundered into her present consti-
tution should lead us to look with tolerance and
with hope on our rising colonies, and teach us not
to be surprised above measure if they do not realise
fully in six months a work which cost us as many
centuries.