Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/205

 AND ms WORK. 101 oflSce, as if it rested with him to prescribe the sentence in l78a-92 every case as well as to sanction its execution. It has been freely insinuated, too, that he must be held responsible for the severity which continued to mark the administration of the criminal law in this colony long after he had disap- Phiiiip'b peared from the scene; as if his successors had merely ments. continued a system which he had established. One writer says of him: — "His punishments were not frequent, but prompt and terrible."* The punishments inflicted on criminals during his time were certainly prompt and ter- rible, but they were not his ; they were inflicted by the Criminal Court, composed of six officers and the Judge- Advocate. That Court was practically a Court-martial ; The cnmi- and although it was supposed to administer justice "accord- ing to the laws of England," it did so after a strictly military fashion. When we read, for instance, that "Joseph Hunt, a soldier in the detachment, having been found absent from his post when stationed as a centinel, was tried by a Court-martial and sentenced to receive seven hundred lashes,"t we have a key to the whole system which prevailed in Phillip's time. But personally he had nothing more to do with it, so far as the infliction of punishment was con- The Oovemor's cerned, than the Governor of the present day has to do with functions the sentences passed on prisoners in the Criminal Courts. The frequent occurrence of such "prompt and terrible punish- ments" in the first yesrs of the settlement has naturally, perhaps, created an impression that they were the work of a cruel temper inflamed by the consciousness of arbitrary The punishments inflicted by Phillip for disobedience of his General Orders were prompt, but not terrible. When, for instance, a party of convicts set out with the intention of avenging the death of a comrade, who had been killed by the natives, Phillip sentenced them to receive one hundred and fifty lashes each, and to wear a fetter for a twelve-month. Judged by the standard of that day, the punishment was a mild one ; for there could not well have been a more aggravated case of insubordination. As Collins expressed it (p. 58), the men in question had '* daringly and flagrantly broken through every order which had been given to prevent their interfering with the natives,'' — a matter of the highest importance in Phillip's eyes. t Collins, p. 56. Digitized by Google
 * ^ "^ not judicial.
 * Bennett, History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation, 1865, p. 169.