TOPICS OF THE DAY.

" THE MOST DEPRAVED COMMUNITY THAT EVER EXISTED IN THE WORLD."

THESE are the words of Lord JOHN RUSSELL, being his descrip- tion of the inhabitants of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. He will hear their echo over and over again, until the punishment of transportation shall be either wholly abolished, or so modified as that it may no longer have the effect of creating a nation of Cypriot's and Turks. The present system is perfectly abominable. Archbishop WHATELY has proved it to be so; Mr. WAKEFIELD, in his Letter from Sidney, which was fully reviewed in the Spectator seven or eight years ago, had the boldness to state in sufficiently plain terms, all the enormities of the system; an article by Sir WILLIAM MoLEsweazir, in the First Number of the London Review, clearly shows the inefficacy of the so-called punishment, and the monstrous nature of the system as respects morality in the penal colonies; the Colonial Office, we have reason to know, abounds with evidence of horrors arising from the sys- tem ; King STEPHEN, some of whose telatives flourish upon the rich patronage of the system, must be saturated with information re- specting its great wickedness: yet of the eight " statesmen" who have filled the office of Colonial Minister during nine years-. BATHURST, HUSKISSON, MURRAY, GODERICH, STANLEY, RICE, ABERDEEN, and GLENELG-every one has been content to mul- tiply the numbers, and thus augment and fortify the depravity, of that people which is become at length, as Lord JOHN RUSSELL says, " the most depraved that ever existed in the world." But what else could have been expected ? The nominal chief of the Colonial Office is changed about once a year: during his brief term of power, he is both the Legislature and the Executive of some two-score distant and widely-different communities, of which, when he enters Downing Street, lie does not know half the names: he is deeply engaged, too, in the Cabinet and in the party politics of this country : and, lastly, as respects Colonial afthirs, he is vir- tually irresponsible, because there is not, here in England, any public opinion or Parliamentary representation to make him an- swer for neglect or misconduct, whilst he naturally despises the public opinion of a complaining, but distant, and therefore help- less colony. It follows necessarily, that the Colonial Minister of England is equally ignorant and indifferent with respect to Colo- nial affairs. In so far as he acts at all, it is in complete reliance upon, and therefore real subjection to, the permanent bureau- cracy of his office. But these irremovable underlings, thoroughly obscure, and operating in secret, are even less responsible than their quick succession of chiefs. They accordingly do, or leave undone, pretty nearly what they please. Capable in nothing but routine, they have an habitual antipathy to change. With them, whatever is, is very good ; and of all that is so good, the most precious part is the patronage. Now, the patronage of the Trans- portation system is immense. By placing a most important branch of English criminal law under Colonial administration- by calling into being " the most depraved community that ever existed in the world"-by punishing, or pretending to punish, English criminals at the antipodes-by making the punishment of crime part of a system of colonization-by this most curiously absurd invention, a great number of places are created, which would not exist if English criminals were punished here, where alone the example of their punishment is required. , Besides, " slaves to their masters," as Lord JOHN RUSSELL terms the con- victs, are of great value in the penal colonies; and the disposal of this great value is so much patronage for the holders of the places which the system creates. The following extract from a recent publication,* very forcibly illustrates this part of the subject. A candid Judge bquitur, in passing "a Sentence of Trans- portation."

" Convict-labourers, as I have said before, are of immense value to the

richer colonists, including the Govetnor and his °dicers, who not only make money by employ ing convicts on their farms, but who can oblige a friend, or

punish an enemy, by giving or withholding convict.labotir. In A tnetica, an able-boiied slave is worth, at least, 100,. Convicts, being moie skilful than negroes, may be worth as much, though rot slaves for life. 11 so, and reckon- ing the number of convicts in Australia and Tasmania at 2,4000, the Go- vernor and officers of those colonies dispose of a value equal to 2,400,0001. ; which produces, counting profits at forty per cent., 960,00011. a year. Is not that a nice little income to be divided amongst a few settlers and officers, over and above the expenditure of Government, which amounts to near :300,0001. a year? In these distant gaols, the Keepers, Turnkeys, and Ordinary, ate called Governor, Treasurer, Secretary, Comisellor, Sup,riiitendezat, and Arch- deacon ; mid are paid accordingly. The Keeper of New South Wa:es is called ' your excellency,' and gets 4,06(11. a year, with a palace to live in, be- sides pickings: the Ordinary gets 2,000/. a year ; and the other: in propor-

tion. Now, if all transports were held in ehilim gangs or pen:,1 settlements, not only would the means be gone for raising this:160.000/. a year, which is so much patronage fur the governors, treasurers, see retaries,COttoHt11,,r,, super inten. dents, and archdeacons, but further, the governois. treasurers, secretaries, coun- sellors, superintendents, and archdeacons. would sink down to jailers, turnkeys, and ordinaries, and might be paid accordingly by the Reformed Parlittlient. Never fear, tnan. All who have power in this matter, the settlers, the Colonial Office's, and the Ministers here at home, are deeply interested in leserving

chain- gangs and penal settlements for none but colonial otlenders. For what you have done here, depend on it, you will not be punished : if you abstain from crime in the colony, you will be richly rewarded for the crime which brought you before me, iortunate rascal that vim ate !

" You have braid, I dare say, of some talk about making the punishment, as they call it, of transportation more severe. This has been talked of (I talk of it myself, to those who, being well off, are ready to believe we) in order to stop the mouths of a few who call for real punishment instead of death. Many schemes of the kind have been talked of before now, when there was an out- • Painslar Politics. By E. G. Wake:Ile:if, Erg. Knight and Co.

cry in England about the comforts and wealth of convicts at Botany Hay. But again, I say, be not alarmed ; for, as before, all the talk will cone to nothing. We may safely judge of the future by the put. In consequence of the late in- crease of crime, and of the number of crimes which well-Informed roguescom- mit on purpose to be transported, the Colonial Minister will write to the Go- vernors of Australia and Tasmania,• saying—Punish the convicts whom I send to you ; and by return of poet, that ill, in the course of a year, the Go- vernors will answer—your orders shall be obeyed. This will be done, be- cause the doing of it will enable the Minister here to say, that " measures have been taken to render the punishment of transportation effectual ;" and will so enable him to preserve the 960,000/. a year and the 300.0001. a year, which I mentioned just now. But the orders of the Minister will be eutirely neglected, as such orders ever have been; because by attending to those orders the Governors would put an end to the 960,00W. a year, besides losing much of their own dignity, as well as, perhaps, some of their pay. It would take a long arm, even if you were in earnest, to force men at the other side of the world to do that which is directly contrary to their own interest. In this cue, the vast distance between the master and his servants will enable the servants to impose upon their master, if, indeed, he should not be wilfully blind. The Governors, and the Treasurers, and the Secretaries, and the Counsellors, and the Superintendents, and the Archdeacons, will make a great show of obedience to the orders of the Minister : they will place a few of the least valuable convicts in chain-gangs and penal settlements; will flog a few more for trifling offencee ; hang an extra dozen or two for graver crimes ; fill the colonial newspapers with minute accounts of these punishments, of the horrors of chain-gangs, penal settlements, the scarification of backs, and stretching of necks ; will per- suade the richer settlers who employ convicts (this will be easy) to join them in writing word home that transportation is become a terrible punishment ; and will then laugh in their sleeves, enjoying as before the disposal of 960,0001. a year, besides their salaries. The farce will, I should not mind betting, impose upon many ; considering the great distance, which checks inquiry and favours imposition. But, however this may be, you, it is plain, have nothing to fear. Go away, man, convinced that in a new country, sixteen thousand miles off, real punishment is contrary to the interests of all concerned—against the very nature of things. "Stay ; one word in your ear. Suppose that it were possible to punish English convicts underneath our feet, still, what advantage would come of it ? advantage, I mean to those who suffer by crimes in Eng- land. During the first years of the transportation-system, when the cap- tains of convict-ships had an interest in killing their passengers, a good half of the convicts used to die on their way towards New South Wales. They used to die of hunger, filth, and scurvy. This was the same as hanging on a very large scale. Did it check crime? not a bit. And why, because the common people here knew nothing about it. The punishment, though heavy enough, God knows, was inflicted at too great a distance from the place where the crimes had been committed. The Government knows this, and must know, therefore, that it is not worth while to punish, out there, in the Southern Pacific, for acts done in this European island. Chain-gangs and penal settle- ments here, at home, might be made an effectual punishment ; but then, what would become of the fat places, fit for gentlemen, to the tune of 000,0001. a year ? Emigrant, go away, rejoicing in your prospects: and if any one, to frighten you, should say that the farce of transportation may not last, that you may perhaps come back to be punished here for the public good, then think of the private interest of the Minister, who appoints the Archdeacons, and the Superintendents, and the Counsellors, and the Secretaries, and the Treasurers, and their excellencies the Governors."

Here we see most distinctly wby the system of transportation is cherished by the real masters in Downing Street, and why, con- sequently, every complaint against that system has passed without notice from any one of eight Colonial Ministers. It may he, however, that the time for some change is not far off. There is good augury in the fact that the Home Secretary, or Minister of Jurisprudence, seems to have taken this subject out of the hands of' the Colonial Office bureaucracy, and to wish that it should be treated as, what it really is, a subject belonging to his own department. Lord JOHN RUSSELL'S account of the moral effects of transportation will surely make a deep impression on the well- disposed of every class in this country. Meanwhile his general condemnation of the system, is enforced by testimony of the highest order. Dr. LANG, senior minister of the Church of Scotland in New South Wales, and Principal of the Australian College at Sydney, who has resided thirteen years with the " most depraved " of communities, has just published a little workt full of evidence that LortlJonN RussELL's description of that community is by no means over-coloured. In proof of this assertion, we offer the following extracts, taken, let us add, almost at random; for nearly the whole book consists of a pleading against what BACON called the "shameful and unblessed thing."

DRUNKENNESS.

"The number of the actual consumers of this vast quantity of intoxicating liquor does not, in all probability, exceed 40,000 persons; each of whom must consequently consume at the enormous rate of upwards of seven gallons a year ! It, therefore, the increase of crime in the United Kingdom is imputed in no small degree to the increased consumption of ardent spirits, what result can reasonably be expected from the transportation system, either in the way of preventing crime or of reforming criminals, in a colony in which the consump- tion is so enormously higher than in Great Britain and Ireland?"

RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION.

" As to any direct means of attempting the reformation of criminals, it is no want of charity to assert, they have scarcely ever been had recourse to in any

form under the colonial system of New South Wales. Even religious instruc- tion, that most powerful means of reformation, was for a long period either withheld fi urn the convicts altogether, or subjected to some counteracting and polluting influence, which served either entirely to neutralize its efficacy, or to convert it into a system of downright mockery and insult. The great majo- rity of the convicts, on the oue hand, being scattered all over the territory, were beyond the reach of pastoral instruction and pastoral viaitation; and the clergy of the territory, on the r, her, who were always stationed in the imme- diate viciuity of those more concentrated masses of population, that were formed under Governor Macquarie's management, were generally created justices of the peace ; the consciau.mee of which was, that the same functionary who on Saturday had been seated on the magisterial bench, and employed chiefly in sentencing to hard labour on the roads, double irons, and a hundred • On the Ifdli of August IH3.1 Mr. (now Lord) Stanley, being Colonial Minister, said in the House of Commons—" Ile should take an early °ppm taunt y of laying before the !louse some important informs:ion relative to the classification of ouvicts in Vali Diemen 's 1.sull, and on the different degrees of punialiment ; some, indeed, anionuting to a degree of severity, of %hick many p•rsons in this country could not be aware, in some climes approaching almost to m's's. t ;Oa (ISOM" Transportation sad Colonisation, by lobo D. Lang, D.D. Valpy, lashes, was on Sunday transformed into a minister of the gospel of peace, a messenger of mercy, and a herald of salvation."

DEPR••ITY.

"Indeed, if the system hitherto pursued in that colony in regard to the management of the convicts, is to be continued, and if all the evils I have enu- merated as having already resulted from that monstrous system, are not only to be entailed on the colony, but to be augmented and perpetuated ad infinitton by large annual importations of criminals from Great Britain and Leland, the entire and immediate discontinuance of transportation, as a species of punish- ment, is a consummation devoutly to be wished' by every reputable inhahitant of New South Wales. That colony is now completely saturated with the depravity to which the transportation system, as it bee hitherto been carried into operation, has necessarily given birth ; and the addition of flesh imports. tions of criminals, at the rate of three thousand annually, to be disposed of as they have hitherto been in the colony, will only increase and aggravate that depravity. • • • • Nay, it cannot be denied, that there are masters in New South Wales, who set so scandalous an example before their convict servants, and treat them on all occasions so much more like brutes than men, that the reformation of a convict in their employment is absolutely hopeless, and his depravation certain. Besides, the facility with which the assigned convict servants of many private individuals can procure ardent spirits, and the temptation which is thus held out to them to resort, as they too often do successfully, to dishonest and vicious practices to procure this indulgence, effectually preclude the possibility of

i reformation, in the case of a large majority of that class of the convict popu- lation."

CORRUFTION OF THE NATIVE YOUTH.

"In this way, sheep and cattle stealing has, within the last few years, grows into a regular system in New South Wales, and is now practised to a prodigious extent; numbers of the native youth of the colony, whose character in this particular at least was formerly above all suspicion, having latterly embarked extensively in the criminal practice, doubtless through their unhappy associa- tion with convict shepherds and herdsmen, ticket of leave men, and emanci- pated convicts possessed of sheep and cattle in the Interior."

NATURE OF THE SO.CALLED PUNISHMENT.

" The punishment, if it can be so called at all, is by no means adequate to the criminal's offence in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred ; and to speak of it as a means of preventing crime in England, and of reforming the trans- ported criminal, is downright mockery. Besides, assigned servants in the tows of Sydney have a thousand ways and means of procuring money, and all those unhallowed indulgences that money can purchase everywhere without the know- ledge or permission of their masters ; or, at all events, they have the means of passing the term of their servitude in comparative idleness, and in the aqui. sition or perpetuation of habits that render them unfit for any useful purpose, and a mere dead-weight upon the community, on the expiration of their period of bondage." Dr. LANG, less polite, though not more severe than Lord JOHN RUSSELL, frequently terms New South Wales, not a colony, but " the dunghill of England : it certainly is her disgrace. How can Archbishop WHATELY reconcile it to his conscience to let this disgraceful system continue, when he must be sure that a fair Parliamentary inquiry would lead to its abolition ? Authentic in- formation conveyed to the people of England—nothing else is re- quisite for the removal of this foul stain on our national character.