PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
C.O.
Reference -
885
2 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- Į COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
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not perhaps without interested motives at the outset, to the reception of convicts either there or in the adjacent colonies. In Van Diemen's Land, on better grounds at the beginning, although such as are hoped to have been substantially removed, an equal amount of opposition has been called forth. In both colonies, and in those which border on them, political persons have made use of this feeling, and turned it into one general political movement of the Australian Colonies.
Simultaneously with this movement, the discovery of gold has put the question in an entirely new light. It seems almost an absurdity to convey offenders at the public expense, with the intention of at no distant time setting them free, to the immediate vicinity of those very gold-fields which thousands of honest labourers are in vain sighing to reach by their own means. It is quite true that the offender has to undergo a preliminary period of imprisonment and of labour, but these are not likely to daunt reckless minds. Indeed we are not left wholly to conjecture for the effects which will be produced on the feelings of the criminal class. Colonel Jebb mentions that in the prisons there is a far more general and eager desire than formerly to be removed to Australia. And if a single example may be cited, the writer of this paper saw at Gibraltar, a few months ago, three youths heavily confined in irons because they had conspired to commit a violent out- rage ou one of their keepers, merely in the hope that it would lead to their being transported to Australia.
of
But if on these grounds, transportation to the Eastern Colonies of Australia be abandoned, the remaining question is, What shall be the alternative? Western Australia does not come within the
scope the arguments just stated. Its free population is not opposed, but, on the contrary, very favourable to the reception of convicts, and its communications with the gold colonies (which can only be reached by sea) are too infrequent and too tedious to render them any solid objection; but then this colony could never absorb all the convicts (on the existing system) of this country.
The resource which first suggests itself to every mind
is the formation of some new Convict Colony, but
this does not meet the real difficulty of the case. So long as convicts are actually in a state of coercion,
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they would probably be better in England than any- where else. The object is to provide for their becoming useful members of society after they cease to be convicts, and this requires that they should be planted in some existing community of free people. To set down in a wilderness a community composed of convicted criminals, and nobody else, would most likely prove truly liable to those objections which have with less justice been taken to their introduc- tion into the free societies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. Still more forcibly does the imputation of uselessness apply to the projects which
are every day offered to the Colonial Department, of placing the convicts in the Falkland Islands or the Auckland Islands, or even at some such ocean island
as St. Paul's or Amsterdam. These places are merely fit for the men whilst in a state of coercion. But it' only a jail were wanted, it would not be necessary
to look so far: Wandsworth Common or any other heath in Surrey would probably be a better site, where the superintendence would be much more efficient, and maintenance much cheaper, than in those remote regions of the globe. Nothing requires more virtue than solitude; and the last people of whom to make Robinson Crusoes are men who have fallen into criminal courses. This has been suffi- ciently illustrated, if illustrations were wanted, in the case of Norfolk Island. Under severe rulers the place became so intolerable, that men were even known to commit murder merely for the sake of the excitement of being taken to Sydney to be hanged; under too easy rulers the prisoners took advantage of the indulgence shown them, to make fierce and bloody insurrections; and both cases equally showed how difficult it is to maintain any thoroughly sound discipline in these remote and isolated situations.
The true solution perhaps is to be found in one of the opinions recorded by the Committee of the House of Commons in 1850, on prison discipline. viz., that an alteration of the law might be "usefully made in order to substitute in many cases for short terms of transportation, longer terms of imprison- ment than are now sanctioned by law." It is unquestionably a great defect in the present condi tion of the law, that there is practically no sentence between that of two years' imprisonment and seven
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