THE TIMES IN DEFENCE OF CONVICTISM I
LIB& the celebrated barrister who found that he had spoken on the wrong side, and too convincingly, the Times occasionally finds itself, as standing counsel for the Colonial Office, much embarrassed by its own former eloquence. For example, on something for ford Grey's latest pr\-;ect of convict transportation; but the good old Times had left the writer scarcely an inch
of ground to stand upon, and so he was obliged to accommodate himself as well as he might on two scraps of quagmire; a sort of literary posture-making more surprising than dignified. The writer was defending the plan of sending convicts from England to the Cape of Good-Hope. The Leading Journal had indeed "ever deprecated the scheme of swamping our Colonial settle- ments with convicts"; but it views Lord Grey's plan of thin- sowing "with a mitigated dislike," which warms into praise-
" It may be fairly questioned whether the real calamity which both colonies [New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land] endured were not the quantity rather than the quality of the labourers, whose forced work gave fertility to their soil and brought wealth to their harbours. Had the number of convicts been always kept below a certain amount,—had it never been permitted to them to divide a whole colony, as they did Van Diemen's Land, with the free inhabitants, —we much doubt whether the enormities of the transportation system, or the complaints of the colonists, would ever have been so gross and so notorious." Perhaps not so gross or so notorious.
"The evil is less apparent, and may become imperceptible, when the convicts, instead of constituting the half, or the majority of a settlement, form but an in- considerable fraction of its people; and when, instead of being collected in masses, they are diffused through a wide and trackless province, subjected to domestic discipline, and punishable by magisterial authority.
And how, we may ask, is that to be effected, with an extremely scattered population of convicts? Is each one to be accompanied by a special policeman ; and if so, at whose cost is said police- man to be maintained, Mother-country's or Colony's? If not, what winged angel is to be "magistrate" over the scattered sons of sin, so that they be "punishable"? The Times has viewed the "pollution" of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land "with horror," but regards the "phy- sical and moral conditions " of the Cape to be exceptional fea- tures." To begin- " The colony, exclusive of its new acquisitions, contains an area of 130,000 square miles, and a population of 120,000 Whites. Small and scattered as this is, there is every probability that it will diminish rather than increase." A charming circumstance I The populution of Egypt has de- creased under the rule of Mohammed Ali,—a fact sometimes cited to show how harsh and destructive his rule has been to the native fellahs : under the dominion of the Colonial Office, the population of the Cape, says the Times, will probably diminish rather than increase. The writer concludes his strange pleading with some of the oddest of pleas, showing how utterly he must have exhausted the stock when, as Chief Justice Pennefather said, he was "on the other side." "If at the end of ten years the system were found pernicious to the inhabitants, it might be checked"; but the Cape must meanwhile try a little depravity, and see how it can stand the poison. It is only an experiment " : "both our ex- periments"—that of convict-colonizing, which endeavoured "to raise a social fabric on the mire and filth of selected depravity,"
and that of more close imprisonment, which "exposed a fellow creature to the contamination of the hulks, the infamies of Nor- folk Island, or the miseries of solitary confinement"—" have been failures," and therefore "we must try some third course "—by mixing the two! So Lord Grey and his cousin George seize on the corpus vile of the Cape for their experimental recreations in the intervals of business; and the Times indulges them by apolo- gizing for their amusement!
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