Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/495

 prrrs statesmanship. 381 convicts and free settlers made by the Pitt Ministry when 1789 the colonisation of New Sonth Wales was undertaken. It was a greater blunder in its way than the passing of the choice Stamp Act in 1765 ; for that might have been remedied by oonvicto repeal^ but the other could not. In all that related to the wuiers. execution of the project^ the matter was determined by the meanest considerations. The future of the colony was ignored as coolly as the sufferings of the wretched people sent out to it. The great moral questions involved in the em- ployment of convicts in founding a colony did not meet with any attention whatever. Just as it was resolved that female savaees should be carried away from their island homes Moni m order to provide convicts with wives, so it was deter- involved in ■*•, founding a mined that the settlement of the territory should be confined colony, to felons in preference to freemen. The social results likely to arise in either case were not viewed as they would be in the present day ; they were shut out of consideration altogether, and the question at issue was reduced to one of practical convenience.* There does not appear to be any foundation for the idea, to which some writers have given expression, that the Pitt's scheme for the settlement of this territory was matured by wiSthe Pitt, still less that it originated with him in a patriotic desire to create new colonies in place of the old. Had the Prime Minister taken any active part in the matter, some traces at least of his hand would have been found in the course of the long negotiations which preceded the sailing comment on it, in his Historical Account of New South Wales. Havins stated the three main objects of the British Government in the formation of the proposed settlement, one of which was " to form a Britisli colony out of those materials which the reformation of the criminals might gradually supply to the Government, in addition to the families of free emigrants who mignt from time to time be induced to settle in the newly discovered terri- tory," the Rev. Dr. remarked : — "These, the reader will doubtless ac- knowledge, were objects altogether worthy of the enlightened legislature of a great nation ; in fact, it was the most interesting and the noblest experi- ment that had ever been made on the moral capabilities of man." Thi^ was published in 1834 ; but it is not conceivable that any such doctrine coulcf be seriously uttered by a great advocate of morality and religion in the present day. Digitized by Google
 * The slow growth of opinion on this question may be seen in Dr. Lang's