passed over to dwell upon the Report of the Committee on Transportation which set forth Macquarie's principle "that long tried good-conduct should lead a man back to the rank of society he had formerly filled," leaving out, said Bent, the next words, "as far as the case could admit".
"Without inquiring," he wrote, "what shall be the marks by which to discover long tried good-conduct, or whether the mere circumstance of not having been brought before a Criminal Court in the Colony is a proof of it—I may safely assert that the good-conduct of the persons in question, … had neither been long nor tried."
The two magistrates told him that the local circumstances of the Colony made it necessary to deviate from the strict custom of other countries. "The local circumstances of this Colony," he replied caustically, "have from its first formation been an excuse for every illegality that caprice or ignorance could dictate. …"
Finding them immovable in their opinion, Bent felt himself "obliged to come to a determination to refuse to admit or swear in persons so circumstanced, and to declare that if the attempt were persisted in to force them upon me, till His Majesty's pleasure should be known, I should be compelled to discontinue the sitting altogether".[1]
Riley and Broughton declared that Bent wished to make a rule of general application altogether excluding emancipists from practice.[2] Bent on his side declared that it was the magistrates who "endeavoured to mix a general abstract principle with the case before the court". The fact was that Bent placed before them the general principles by reason of which he proposed to reject the petitions in question, and that the magistrates confused the premises and the conclusion.[3]
The court met again on 11th May without having agreed upon their course of action. W. H. Moore, one of the Government solicitors, as he and Garling were called in the Colony was admitted, and Bent administered the oaths. Crosley then
