LORD GREY'S NEWEST MISSION.
FAITH, argues Lord Grey, must be kept with the convicts, in whose cells a promise has been hung up that they shall have tickets of leave as the reward of good conduct ; and transporta- tion, which has been the policy of this country for two hundred years, must not be departed from, " without necessity." To en- force that position, Lord Grey has given a notice the effect of which is to suspend the measure of which the Government has less formally given n..)tice, until Parliament shall have received an ac- count of the intended proceedings, and shall have had an op- portunity of considering them. How so constitutional a states- man as Lord Grey will justify so abrupt an intervention we can- not tell. It is to be supposed that if any alteration in the law is requisite to carry out the plan contemplated by Ministers, they will come to Parliament with an explanation and ask for those powers in a regular way ; and then would be the time for Lord Grey to object, instead of raising a debate on a project which has, as yet, no cognizable existence, and about which he has not even informa- tion enough to shape a conjecture. If no bill be introduced into Parliament, it must be because no further powers are deemed re- quisite ; and then any change will lie with the responsible Execu- tive under shadow of the prerogative ; on which Lord Grey, in rash indiscriminate anticipation, makes such heedless assault. He treats prerogative and constitution as Dr. Johnson treated his favourite : " Garrick is my dog, sir, and nobody shall kick him but myself."
However, passing that high question, confident that both pre- rogative and Lord Grey will survive the combat, we turn to the more substantial matter—the evident intention of the " crotchety being" to get up a resistance against the measures rendered ne- cessary by the discontinuance of transportation to the Australian Colonies. That opposition might become troublesome, because we have already seen that certain Judges lend to his view a collateral authority which receives more deference than it deserves ; and be- cause there are in the Upper not less than in the Lower House of Parliament mischievous spirits watching to take advantage of any move that can be turned against Mihisters, as such. The verdict of the House of Lords, however, is in the main tolerably inde- pendent at present ; and those Peers who do not quite postpone public interests to party will reflect on the responsibility that will lie upon them if they obstruct an inevitable proceeding on the part of the Executive. For we believe that a very moderate amount of consideration will show how inevitable it is.
Lord Grey's position rests upon two presumptions,—that trans- portation must continue, and that no substitute for it can be found. Both presumptions are fallacies. The former, indeed—that trans- portation must continue—is, in the ordinary sense of the word, the reverse of a truth. Transportation cannot continue. It is a fact settled beyond refutation that the existing colonies will not have convicts again : the attempt to found new colonies with a convict population, condemned by Lord Bacon in anticipation, has been tried in America and Australia, and found to be too disas- trous in its ultimate results for repetition ; and even if we had not that deterrent experience, there really is not in the world an avail- able site. A survey of the regions accessible to us will establish these positions. If Lord Grey were asked whither he intended to send either assigned convicts, ticket-of-leave men, or reformed exiles, he would probably reply, at first, to Western Australia, or Moreton Bay, or Van Diemen's Land, where there are colonists willing to receive them. But it is too notorious for repetition, that the convicts introduced into one part of Australia percolate to the important colonies and to the gold-diggings : and are there half a dozen men, old enough and sane enough to sit in the House of Lords, who would support Lord Grey in punishing crime with a probationary journey to the gold-diggings ; or who, to oblige a
° few settlers in the straggling parts of Australia, would provoke the three principal colonies, if not Van Diemen's Land, to rebellion ? Lord Grey calls his friends in Van Diemen's Land " the colonists," or "public opinion," and says that they are in favour of trans- portation • but he is answered by his own argument on the Canada Clergy Reserves : the Local Legislature has emphatically declared against it, and he is bound to receive the vote of the Legisla- ture as the voice of the colony. Independently, however, of these substantial grounds, there is the further reason, that successive Governments have promised the discontinuance of transportation, and that the present Ministry has set the seal upon that promise in the most irrevocable form. If faith is to be kept with convicts, it is to be kept also with colonies ; though Lord Grey's conduct has too often implied an opinion to the contrary. The same problem has been worked out in the Cape of Good Hope, with results still more unmistakeable, by Lord Grey him- self. He was obliged, by actual rebellion, to withdraw his con- victs; and does he suppose that he can get any other Minister to brave the contest from which he was forced to a discreditable re- treat ? South Africa is closed against the revival of transportation. We need scarcely dwell upon the North American Colonies. Into which one of them, we may ask, would even Lord Grey ven- ture to introduce convicts—at once the odious provocative and the willing recruitment of rebellion ? Would convicts be more toler- able than the Clergy Reserves ?
The West Indies undoubtedly offer some peculiar advantages for a new species of transportation, which might tempt to enter- prising invention. The colonists have been deprived of one kind of forced labour, and might—though we must not presume it— consent to receive another species. If the climate and the avoca- tions are fatal to Europeans, we need not be too tender about men who are, as it were, under a commuted sentence of death. But evidently the convicts must be kept in close restraint as slaves ; for to let them go at large would entail responsibilities too fright- ful even for a Grey to contemplate with closet equanimity. Run- away Blacks have been pest enough, but a mixed brigandage of Maroons and convicts would be an institution unprecedented in its horror and loathsomeness. What British statesman would dare to call into being that mongrel Brown race with a parentage of de- bauched Blacks and stupid depraved Whites ? We do not overlook the fact that the Falkland Islands are the New Atlantis of the Convict-Utopian : but the nature of any es- tablishment to be founded there must not be mistaken. Here also the convicts must be restrained in forced labour ; for the islands are peculiarly unsuited to any employment of convicts at large. The two principal islands are not very promising for ordinary settle- ment ; the settlers must be few and scattered ; and thus they must be weak before the convicts, if they be not too few to send so far. The most probable pursuit Of the island is stock-grazing ; one of those lazy remote employments which have given rise to such hor- rors of depravity in Australia. The high grass of the waste amid the sea would be a jungle for the two-legged wild beast rivalling " the bush "--the pursuer always more visible than the fugitive. And if the two larger islands sh-ould at any time prove too hot to hold these buccaneers, there is an archipelago of smaller islands some sixty in number. No—if convicts go to the Falkland Islands, places must be built to imprison them in, and labour must be found to employ them ; and it is a long way to go for such ends. Transportation cannot he continued, or rather renewed. If, by
the greatest stretch of indulgence, Lord Grey were permitted to make his dangerous experiment in renewal, it ought to be on one condition only—that he should go out as superintendent and re- sponsible keeper of the band. The other presumption, that no substitute can be found, and that
we must get rid of our human rubbish, is equally untenable. Other countries have been obliged to keep their convicted prisoners at home ; and because the French have a bad plan of travaux forces it does not follow that we must not have a good one, any more than it follows that we ought to give up our political consti- tution because our neighbours have made Parliamentary repre- sentation such a failure. The truth is, that a great double duty, of retrenching laws that make criminals, and of providing a sys- tem of secondary punishment, has been shirked ; but now we can shirk it no longer. Because the convicts are troublesome to ma- nage and odious to view, it does not follow that we do our duty best by shovelling them out of sight. Lord Campbell asserts on his authority as a "judge," that transportation is efficacious both to reform and to deter. We have already denied Lord Campbell's special experience on the point. Beyond the dramatic scenes, in which the pathos of a good actor on the bench may move the au- dience in court, or even the brother actor in the dock, at the idea of " exile," he can have no personal knowledge. In colonial life he is not experienced. He does not follow the prisoner out of court to know the working of the punishment or motives in a rude criminal mind. If transportation has been so efficacious, crime ought to be diminishing—which it is not ; and the very subject-matter of the discussion ought to have been diminishing by a decline in the number of candidates for transportation. On the contrary, our legislation keeps up the supply. The larger proportion of the criminals exist by our sin, because we suffer the people to be bred badly, educated not at all, and provided with labour as ingenuity may dictate to the ignorant, the destitute, and the desponding. One principle of secondary punishment has not yet been effectively tried—that of correctional discipline. There are many reasons to suppose that while convict-keeping could be rendered self-support- ing, or at least self-compensating, the moral effect of the punish- ment would be heightened by introducing the principle of restitu- tion to wronged society—the wholesome principle of atonement. More than one experiment has shown that at home public labour can be made a sound economy. One suggestion has been to hire out so much labour, by public contract, to be executed in du- resse, at the pleasure of capitalist employers. Public works de- mand, just now, a great and a speedy application of brute force to the under branches of industry, such as the rougher prepara- lives to improve some of our natural defences. And the state of the labour-market offers peculiarly favourable opportunities for effecting this improvement without raising an invidious cry of in- jury to the independent labourer. On the contrary, by a judi- cious use of rude labour, the work of the independent la- bourer and its returns to himself can be extended and ex- pedited. But, however we do it, in some way the task lies be- fore us, of relieving the pressure of the convict burden by prevent- ing the multiplication of convicts through ignorance and destitu- tion, and of providing for the safe self-supporting custody of that which we cannot prevent. While we talk about transportation as a still existing alternative, we only distract ourselves from the duty before us, or help a mischief-maker to interpose before the execution of a great and inevitable public duty an obstruction that might be disastrous in its immediate consequences.
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