PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference
TEC.O.
885
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perhaps be lightened further, if thought neces- sary, by borrowing the money of the Exchequer Loan Commissioners, with arrangements for paying it off in ten or twenty years, as might be deemed
proper.
A few statistical tables are placed in the Appen- dix. A great discrepancy will be observed between the numbers annually sentenced to transportation and the numbers actually removed. This is ac- counted for partly by the fact that for the present a large proportion of the convicts are, under a com- paratively new system, undergoing preliminary periods of punishment at home prior to their re- moval; and partly also by the circumstance that many are invalids or otherwise unsuited to be trans- ported; as well as that a certain per centage of course die in the two or three years which elapse before they become eligible for removal to Australia.
It is time, however, to bring this long paper to a close. The conclusions to which it has led may be summed up as follows:
1st. That transportation, so long as suitable outlets can be commanded, is an excellent portion
of
any system of secondary punishment.
2nd. That all the colonies, however, on the southern and eastern sides of Australia, have now for different reasons ceased to afford such an outlet.
3rd. That the formation of new penal settlements would not meet the real difficulty of the case.
4th. That Western Australia continues for the present to be eligible for the reception of convicts, but that it can by no means absorb the whole number who, in the existing state of the law, are annually sentenced to transportation.
5th. That independently of these considerations connected with transportation, it is at all events a defect in the present state of the law, that there is no intervening sentence between two years' impri- sonment and seven years' transportation.
6th. That the best course, therefore, is to provide for carrying into effect at home a larger number of sentences to long terms of imprisonment, and to substitute these for all sentences of transportation not exceeding ten years, and to abolish transporta- tion altogether, except for crimes involving sentences
to more than ten years' punishment.
7th. That when these measures can be brought
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sufficiently into execution, transportation to Van Diemen's Land shall wholly cease, and Western Australia become the only place for the reception
of transported offenders.
Bermuda and Gibraltar are omitted from these conclusions, because both in law and fact they are not places of transportation properly so called, but only places for working convicts at hard labour, in like manner as any English prison or the English dockyards, and this character they will still retain. Bermuda may probably be conveniently given up for the accommodation of Irish prisoners, and Gibraltar kept for that of English prisoners; but this will be matter of arrangement for the Executive Government, and can be determined, from time to time, as circumstances may require.
T. F. E.