of houses and goods for the sake of the insurance, rioters, and thieves, down to a very low denomination of theft. The convicts whose labour was desired for the new settlements in Australia and elsewhere were the light-fingered gentry, the smugglers, poachers, passers of bad coin, rural malcontents, seditious speakers, cheats, and rowdies who might be employed by colonists without alarm, and were as likely as not to turn honest under encouragement and favourable circumstances. As Romilly and his coadjutors rescued one class of offenders after another from the gallows, those classes, more and more gravely guilty as the amelioration at home went on, became the subjects of transportation, till at last, when hanging was nearly confined to wilful murder alone, the new convicts became the terror and despair of every colonial household, and the system came suddenly to an end in all our chief dependencies.
But, again, the method never did anywhere answer in the long run. It is impossible to relate the facts, as recorded in the evidence abundantly furnished to parliamentary committees and in official reports, of the state of society wherever the poison of the system has been introduced. All who have any knowledge on the subject agree with Mr. Adderley in his recent declaration, that no man who would escape damnation would advocate a renewal of transportation as it has turned out in our hands. It is impossible to call a system a success, in any light, of which this could be said.
It will not do to say that only the milder sort of offenders shall be sent out; because this does not meet our difficulty. It does not rid us of our garotters and burglars, while the colonists would be but little better off for this, as the milder offenders become very gross criminals indeed in the course of the voyage, from the evil influences of the convict ship. The one colony which, being unprosperous, clings to the hope of enrichment by convict labour, stipulates that the offenders sent out shall not be very bad people, and that they shall not be more than a few hundreds a year (the largest number proposed is 1000); that an equal number of honest free labourers shall always be sent out, and women enough to be wives to the convicts. Some of these West Australian advocates have pretended to a preference between bonny Irish girls and our Lancashire lasses, for this singular conjugal destination. These odd notions and demands speak for themselves. They have shown all the world how little help we can have in regard to our criminals from the one colony which has not yet repudiated transportation; and they are sufficiently answered by the short questions,—why honest free labourers should submit to live among convicts, when there are better places to go to which are exempt from that curse? and why any company of convicts should expect such luck as having good girls from Ireland or Lancashire for wives? As for the rest, there will probably be a continuance for a time of an annual transportation of a few hundreds of thieves and cheats to Western Australia, till it is found that the voyage, and the influences of male convict society afterwards, turn the thieves and cheats into ruffians of a continually grosser quality. Then the colony will, like all the rest, refuse to receive any more criminals,—if, indeed, this has not happened sooner, through the inevitable failure of the stipulations about honest comrades and virtuous wives.
There remains only one more suggestion,—that some rough, remote, almost inaccessible place might be found, to which we might deport our really unmanageable criminals, where they must suffer so much from a rude climate and unfriendly soil, that only by the severest toil can they support life.
No scheme, of all that have been proposed, can be more impracticable than this. No place has been pointed out that would answer the purpose; and it may be safely said that none ever will. Such a place—a settlement of the worst of men, without any women, or with only a sprinkling of them, sure to die under the hardships of the life—would be a hell upon earth which no honest men would undertake to guard or govern. If the spot were practically inaccessible, it would be enormously expensive; and, if not, it would not answer its purpose. All the evils of the Transportation system would be added to a cost greater than that of keeping the felons imprisoned at home; and the cruelty would be such as Englishmen would not hear of, from the moment they understood the fact that a large proportion of our worst ruffians are weak in intellect, and no small number, half-idiots.
It is not my business here to go on to consider what should be done with our convicts. That is quite another topic, of which I have spoken before, and may speak again. I need only say that nothing could be more natural than the cry of last Christmas—“We must get rid of our ruffians! We must return to transportation!” and that, as the colonies must be by this time relieved of their fear and pain and anger at that saying, we need hardly regret it. We might fairly be vexed at the waste of time and talk that it involved, and ashamed of the want of knowledge and sense that it disclosed: but these may be worth undergoing for the sake of the thorough clearing-up of the case, which now enables us to speak of the transportation system as virtually at an end. It was before as impracticable as it could be: and now it is effectually understood to be so. Here, therefore, we may dismiss the old way of leaving one’s country for one’s country’s good, and turn to the new, and honest, and bright, and creditable way of rendering that service to Old England.
The change of the popular mind about Emigration, as a relief under the present calamity of the country, is of a later date and more remarkable character than that which has occurred about Transportation.
It would have been quite as good a thing—even better—for some hundreds or thousands of our Lancashire people to have gone to Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, or Canada last year as this: yet how differently has the idea been treated in 1862 and 1863! Some months ago, no friend of the cotton operatives could speak of emigration
