Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/328

 218 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. To nnderstand the principles on which the criminal laws were administered by the Judge- Advocate's Court during the early years of the colony, it is necessary to recollect what those laws were in England throughout the same period. The progress of reform during the present century has brought about so many and such radical changes in the administration of justice, that we are apt to look back upon the proceedings of the Judge- Advocate's Court as if they formed an abnormal and unsightly excrescence on the fair body of English jurisprudence. Apart from the summary method in which the business of the Court was transacted, the want of all proportion between crime and its punish- Prevaient mcut scoms in most cases to have been so excessive, that the tion. severity of the law is usually attributed to the personal dis- position of those who administered it. They have been regarded as the originators of a system under which all notions of justice and humanity were carefully excluded from view when an offender was brought up for trial; as if the infliction of some brutal punishment for its own sake was the sole aim and end of their proceedings. The cruel tortures of the lash are supposed to have been reck- lessly inflicted, and the hangman's rope to have been brought into requisition with almost as little scruple as the dreaded scourge. The fact is, however, that the founders of the colony were hardly more responsible for the severity of the law than they were for the conditions of the atmosphere they had to breathe. The criminal laws which they brought Digitized by Google