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No. 6.
Downing-street, November 10, 18-49.
(No. 173.) SIR,
1. I HAVE received your Despatch, No. 42, of the 21st of March last, enclosing various addresses and communications which have been addressed to you at Melbourne against the introduction of convicts with tickets-of-leave into that portion of New South Wales, together with the published report of a public meeting at Sydney, at which strong objections were expressed to the introduction of such convicts into the Middle District.
2. I regret to learn that the measure of sending convicts with tickets-of- leave to New South Wales has been so strongly objected to by many persons in the colony, and it becomes necessary, in consequence of the manner in which these objections have been urged, that I should briefly review the proceedings which have taken place on this subject, and that I should explain both the grounds upon which Her Majesty's Government have acted in what has already been done with reference to it, and the course which it is intended now to pursue. 3. On the 30th of April, 1846,* my predecessor instructed you, as Governor of the colony, to ascertain whether to send convicts to New South Wales after
a previous period of probation would be acceptable to the inhabitants. On the 6th of November, 1846,† in answering this inquiry, you transmitted some peti- tions which had been addressed to the Legislative Council against the renewal of transportation, and at the same time a report from a Committee of Council, expressing an opinion in its favour, provided that it should be accompanied by certain measures which the Committee recommended. These measures I will not enumerate here; they are set forth perspicuously in the Report itself, but. I may state that two leading features of the Committee's recommendations were, first, that free emigrants (including the wives and families of the prisoners) should be sent out in a number equal to that of the convicts; and secondly, that instead of being placed in a state of almost entire freedom, the convicts should he subject to a strict power of control, so that if introduced, for example, from Van Diemen's Land, they should rather be so with tickets-of-leave than as the holders of conditional pardons.
4. When this report reached England. the duty devolved upon me of acquainting you, in my Despatelt of the 3rd September, 1847, that Her Majesty's Government could not concur in all the proposals of the Committee, especially as these proposals contemplated a recurrence to the assignment of convicts, a practice which had been for some years discontinued, in accordance with the opinion of a Committee of the House of Commons, which had advised its abandonment on such strong grounds as must preclude its renewal. But though the views of the Committee of the Legislative Council could not be entirely adopted, to a considerable extent they met with our concurrence, and they formed the main foundation of an arrangement which I proposed for the con- sideration of the Legislative Council in my Despatch of September 3, 1847, and which included both of the important suggestions of the Committee to which I have above more particularly adverted.
pro-
5. Her Majesty's Government were the more induced to expect that the posal thus made might be regarded as satisfactory by the Committee of the Legislative Council, because it was considered that by sending out convicts with tickets-of-leave, after a due period of probation in this country, the advantages which really had belonged to the system of assignment might be secured without the evils by which, who was formerly in force, this system had been attended. The leading advantage of assignment was that it supplied the demand of private employers for labour, and that it placed the convicts, when they were fortunate in their masters, in circumstances favourable to their reformation, by dispersing them in the more thinly inhabited districts of the colony, instead of congregating them in large masses, or allowing them to remain exposed to the temptations of the larger towns. This advantage would seem equally to belong to permitting convicts by means of tickets-of-leave to work for their own livelihood, and at the same time distributing them into
Page 12 of Papers relative to Convict Discipline, presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command, February, 1649
Page 3 of similar Papers of 15th April, 1847. Page 7 of similar Papers of ard May, 1948.
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