CONVICTISM SENT HOME.

WHAT to do with our convicts, is a question which cannot be postponed much longer; nay, it presses already. Most of our Colonies in any way suited to receive convicts have refused ; no statesman, we presume, would be mad enough to send them to North America. Western Australia, it is said, consents by her representatives in this country ; but we have yet to hear whether the people in the colony will be so well pleased. And even if the handful of people in this poor dependency should receive convicts for the sake of contracts with Government, there cannot be the slightest expectation that convictism will work any better in Western Australia than it has worked in Eastern Australia or Van Diemen's Land. Already we see that the convicts recently introduced into New South Wales are reviving the shocking crimes which brought about the discontinuance of transportation ; and as Western Australia is in all respects feebler than the other colonies of the island-continent, it is to be presumed that it will experience still more difficulty in keeping the .criminal emigrants in order. Of course they will wander away into the bush, where many will happily die ; others will live to scourge the greedy colonists that consented to receive them, and others will find their way to South Australia, where there is something to steal. The bribe which Lord Grey throws out, avowedly. "to conciliate " the colonists, fails not only through its barefaced purpose, but through its utter worthlessness. He proposes to spend a Parliamentary grant in sending an equal number of "free emigrants" " to those colonies which consent to receive convicts from this country " ; a bribe which would not be sufficient to purchase consent eve' ' -e genuine. But it is not genuine. The fi's-.I if it we t of four classes —the wives and sea pensioners, sent out in guard d. families of said pensioners ; workhouses in different parts trly the worst class that can be t degree a penal law, and the

., offenders against that penal workhouse is a sort of lax prison fo,

-.11 daughters of professed paulaw ; the girls are for the most part seased, and incorrigibly depers, and therefore ill-organized, di s have sunk into their abject prayed ; or they are young persons wh Id experience confirms the condition through early corruption; at the most demoralized, reanticipation of their conduct—they are, . aigrant-ships. Such are fractory, and unmanageable class in eit iy "if there should not Lord Grey's "free emigrants": it is on . the foregoing descripbe a sufficient number of emigrants nutlet that "the balance will tions to employ the whole of the grant," he same rules as those be expended in sending emigrants under t, at is the class cornestablished for the Colonial land-funds," t1. What M What Lord Grey monly and correctly called "free emigrants:I wing of convictism. so calls is nothing more than the camp-folios n put his name to

—...emigrants are to consis families of male convicts ; Che of the convicts ; the wives an "girls properly selected from the of the kingdom. The last is ne chosen. Our Poor-law is in a grea Is it not humiliating to see an English noblem language so transparently disingenuous ? colonies; all that This bribe, then, must fail withall intelligent\ families, guards, have refused convicts are as likely to repel the .. ustralia the opand vice-companions of convicts. In Western Al d then, even if probrious system will soon become intolerable ; ans onomical poliwe do not lose some of our colonies, as diceisse ir convicts at ticians wish, we shall be obliged to provide for ok

home.‘ does not folWhy need we be BO alarmed at that prospect? It \ the progeny low that we must be overrun with " forcats,' that is, 4 untries are of the-bad system which exists in France. Other co itainala at

without colonies, and have to provide for their own c: Are we home—Prussia, for example, and all the German states. armed at so much more vicious than Prussia, that we should be al, the prospect of being placed in her circumstances with respect to criminal prisoners ?

It must be remembered that convictism is. not an old instita. tion amongst us, nor is.it a origin very venerable. Traces of it may perhaps be found in the age of Judge Jeffreys, when it was thought prudent to commute the wholesale capital sentences of the Bloody Assizes to banishment to the Plantations; but, as we

understand it, convictism is only about seventy years old. Nor are the motives to the solicitude for maintaining Colonial trans portation altogether respectable : among. the strongest, though it is not avowed, is the desire of the country gentlemen to keep down the county-rates. To that end, they desire to throw the cost of their prisoners on the Consolidated Fund, the re sponsibility on the State.; to that end, they, as legislators and as magistrates, encourage such constructions of fact and law as make offences subject to transportation rather than imprisonment. Transportation has helped the country gentlemen to break down one of our old Saxon institutions, which made the hundred an swerable for its trespassers ; and to a proportionate extent it has

destroyed the motive to the diligent prevention of crime. Formerly, if a district were kept free from crime, it reaped the reward in its

immunity from the financial and other consequences of crime:

if it were fertile in crime, it was fined for its negligence,by the consequent expense. That motive we have allowed the gentry,

the owners of the land, to evade; we have allowed the landlord or tenant to cast upon the State the keeping of his poacher, his rick-burner, his starving turnip-stealer; nay, under Lord Grey's bribe to Convict Colonies, we are to send out the pauper. Bad farming and harsh or negligent landlordism make pauperism, turnip-stealing, rick-burning, and poaching ; but as the, conse

quences fall upon the State, we release the landlord frosts, the motive to amend. Abolish Colonial transportation, and you only throw back the responsibility where it lay of old, and revive the motives to a more economical system a parish ethics and polity, than that which creates convict emigration and parish-pauper emigration—the two most costly, wasteful, and mischievous kinds of emigration, that you can devise. We do not deny that the combined resources of the State may be beneficially employed to aid the local magistrate in devising

plans for the disposal of his convict-prisoners ; but in order to be prepared with a better system on the cessation of the present, it would be necessary to confront the question at ence, and at once to deal with it candidly, diligently, and effectively. It would not even be necessary for keeping up local responsibility to keep up also literally local imprisonment ' • it would be as easy for parishes or counties to combine in providing for moral lunatics as they do

for lunatics hi the ordinary sense of the term. Nor does it follow that the country should be overrun with " forcats," that lathe worst order of released convicts. We do not use to cenfine lunatics

for a fixed term of years, but for so Jong as they continue to be mischievous. These are among the points which have to be con

sidered—and really considered, not merely mentioned. But in truth, no time should be lost, for virtually Colonial transportation is at an end.