The Press. — 1856-11-29 (London, England)

THE PRESS.  f)r. adventurous spirits, and so many chances of reformation. That our criminals cannot be borne in Sydney and Melbourne is to our mind the best nrgnment that they cannot be borne in London; and is so far from showing that transportation must be abolished, that it furnishes incontestable reasons why it should be revived and extended. The ticket•of•leave system, however well intended, is a failure for two reasons. First, because it retains experienced offenders in the country ; and, secondly, because the terrors of conviction are thereby very much diminished in the eyes of those who have not yet violated the law. The consequence is, a rapid improvement in the art of evading detection, and a corresponding increase in the encouragement to crime. Thus offences multiply at a sort of compound interest, the result of which in a few years it is perfectly shocking to contemplate. Some new localities must be found for penal settlements, and that speedily, if we would not have the population of this country rise, as that of California has done, and establish a Vigilance Committee. Without exaggeration, we believe they will soon take the law into their own hands in some fashion or another, if they are not relieved from the apprehension of being throttled, stabbed, beaten, robbed, jumped upon, and murdered, as soon as it grows dusk and the policeman is well out of hearing. The fact is, it is idle any longer to say we cannot transport our convicts. We must transport them, or else transport ourselves, for the country is too narrow to hold both.  We dissent from those persons who seem to imagine that every new foreign settlement is, de jure, entitled to dictate terms to the mother country. No definite rule can be laid down. It would he in the highest degree unjust and unwise to force our convicts on communities like Sydney and Tasmania. But that Sydney and Tasmania are too flou rishing to be penal settlements now, is, in great measure, due to the fact that they were penal settlements once. The predecessors of the race, who talk so loudly of contamina don, were illud quod dicere nolo. They did most of the rough work which the infancy of a colony requires, and if a new settlement is founded the same process might be observed. As for the alleged taint in the blood, it is an argument which we suppose the Australians would be as unwilling to bring forward as we should. If, in fine, prosperous and orderly communities have arisen out of penal establishments in one quarter of the globe, why should they not do so in another?  In forming new penal settlements, two things seem to be required. First, that they should be sufficiently remote from civilised society; secondly, that the country shou'd be large enough to afford scope for industrial labour. But there really does not seem to be any great want of such localities if we would only take the trouble to look for them. There is the greater part of the north coast of Australia; there is the east coast of Africa; there are the Falkland Islands ; there is Borneo, inhaoited only by savages ; and, lastly, there is our own Island of Ceylon. There may, of course, be objections, of which we know nothing, to many of these places ; but some one of them would, probably, turn out to be available, or, even it not, there are surely other tracts of country on the world's surface which we could employ in the manner proposed.  Corrtspontatt.