autocracy at Sydney, were driven into the arms of the Whigs and the Radicals in England.[1]
It was without their solicitation and apparently without their knowledge that Jeremy Bentham took up the subject of New South Wales in 1802. In this year he wrote his two letters to Lord Pelham. The first compared the system of dealing with criminals by transportation to New South Wales with his own scheme of the Panopticon, the second described the home penitentiaries of America. His attention was thus called to the condition of New South Wales by the neglect of his Panopticon, and in 1803 he pursued the subject in a pamphlet entitled "A Plea for the Constitution," in which he discussed not the "policy of the settlement," but its "legality".[2]
The only material before Bentham in writing of New South Wales was that provided by a few remarks by the Select Committee on Finance in 1798, and the History of New Holland by Lieutenant-Governor Collins, of which a second edition was published in 1802 and which gave in diary form a naïve account of colonial life.[3]
Little noticed as these writings of Bentham's were, it seems worth while to give some account of his treatment of the Colony's affairs for two reasons, first because each point to which he turned his attention came to be discussed afterwards, and because the two men who chiefly bestirred themselves in New South Wales affairs between 1810 and 1820, Sir Samuel Romilly and the Hon. H. Grey Bennet, both came within the influence of Bentham.[4]
In the first letter to Lord Pelham,[5] Bentham sought to dis-
- ↑ The Canadians took much the same course. See letter above, Lord Liverpool to Sir J. Craig. "You may rely upon it, that if the subject of the constitution of Canada was brought under the discussion of Parliament, the cause of the Canadians would be warmly supported by all the democrats and friends of reform in the country."
- ↑ The letters to Lord Pelham were published in 1802. The Plea for the Constitution in 1803. See Romilly's Memoirs, 1791, vol. i., p. 417, published in 1840. The copy of the Plea in the British Museum belonged to Sir S. Romilly (a gift from the author).
- ↑ This volume, with a very inferior production by Mason in 1811, remained the only sources of information in regard to New South Wales available in England up till 1812. See Romilly's Speech in House of Commons, 12th February, 1812. Hansard, vol. xxii., p. 762.
- ↑ Romilly of course directly, and Bennet through Francis Place. See later, p. 302.
- ↑ P. 68. Letter to Lord Pelham.
