CONTENTS.
Question of the MERITS or TRANSPORTATION.
Page
Arguments in favour
16
Objections, and the Replies
16
Practical Obstacles in the existing Colonica
17
Reasons why a new Colony would not meet the difficulty
17
Conclusions, therefore, which led the Government to give up the punishment,
and to substitute Penal Servitude
Statistics
18
19
BERMUDA AND GIBRALTAR
APPENDIX.
1. Number of Convicts sent to the different Colonies in Australia
11. Number transported from Great Britain and Ireland respectively
III. Numbers transported to Bermuda and Gibraltar
"
IV. Amount of Votes for the Convict Establishments in the Colonies
V. Amount of Votes for Expense of Transport
VI. Number of Persons sentenced to Transportation and Penal Servitude
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CONFIDENTIAL.
Colonial Office,
March 1856.
Transportation.
PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
C.O.
Reference:-
885
2 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
Plan of the Paper.
3
THE plan of this paper will be, first to advert briefly to the early history of transportation, to the great inquiry into that subject which was made by a Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1837 and 1838, and to the measures which ensued then to recapitulate somewhat more fully the events of the last eight or nine years, which have ended in ceasing to send convicts to any other Colony than Western Australia, and in substituting as to the the great bulk of offences the punishment of penal servitude for that of transportation; and, finally, to offer a few remarks on the causes which seemed to render this change inevitable.
Early History.
For upwards of seventy years transportation has been employed by this country as the principal means of secondary punishment. The convicts have been sent to New South Wales and to Van Diemen's Land, which settlements were formed, it must be borne in mind, at a great cost, expressly for the reception of offenders.
By degrees the emancipated convicts prospered and became possessed of independent means, and free settlers also proceeded to these colonies, as they began to offer a favourable field for enterprise.
The convicts used to be assigned to the colonial proprietors as servants. This system had two great advantages: it dispersed the convicts over the face of the country at a distance from one another, and it gratified the settlers by giving them the benefit of free labour; but it consti-
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