of and intolerable an innovation; insomuch, that individuals v^ho had accumulated hundreds and even thousands a year through the labour of their convict servants, without having ever deemed it necessary to expend a single farthing for their spiritual welfare, have had the modest assurance to ascribe the accumulated moral evils that have resulted from the original constitution of the colony, and from the manner in which it had been suffered to grow up to comparative maturity during a period of forty years and upwards of tory neglect and mismanagement, to the relaxed system of penal discipline recently introduced by Sir Richard Bourke!
For my own part, conceiving that under a proper system of penal discipline the brutalizing punishment of flogging might in great measure be dispensed with, and that the Governor was therefore in the right in limiting the colonial magistrates to fifty lashes, I cannot but regard the increase of crime, which these gentlemen deplore in their petitions to parliament, and of which I am sorry to say there can be no question, as an evidence of the utter impracticability of carrying on the government of New South Wales, under the system of management hitherto pursued in regard to the convicts, any longer, and of the absolute necessity of an immediate and funda-
