Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/348

 were based. The reasons for this were not far to seek. Many individuals in the Colony had given information to the Commissioner which they did not wish their neighbours to peruse. All the quarrels and petty disagreements which were probably unavoidable in such a remote and curious settlement as that of New South Wales might have been roused afresh by the publication of all the correspondence and evidence, and to publish a selection only was thought unwise. The most important witnesses also were as a rule those who most desired their evidence to be treated as confidential. Even as it was Bigge was forced to insert in his third report a virtual apology for the references to W. C. Wentworth's "Pipe" on Molle which he had made in the first report. On the whole, however, his work is a monument of official discretion; though a glance at the unpublished evidence shows that to make it so must have been a matter of no small difficulty.

As the main object of his mission had been to consider the fitness of New South Wales for a penal station, Bigge's first Report dealt almost entirely with the subject of the convicts and "their treatment, character and habits". Already his description of their actual conditions has been many times quoted, and in this place it is more important to consider his recommendations for their future treatment. In this respect the most striking note of his report is its absolutely conservative character. Whether or no the Government had been sincere in their suggestion of bringing transportation to New South Wales to an end, such a project never seems in Bigge's mind to have come within the sphere of practical politics. This was not because he approved of the system enforced by Macquarie, but rather because he did approve the system advocated by the land-owning agriculturalists, and because he saw quite clearly that New South Wales might, with profit to the mother country and to at least a portion of her inhabitants, be turned into a great wool-producing country under one of the simplest systems of capitalist production ever established. This project was foreshadowed in