Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/66

 Ivi AX INTRODUCTORY Ijj reading the evidence given by Banks before the Committee^ it is not pleasant to find him identifying himself so readily with the proposal to establish a penal settlement at Botany Bay. He made no remonstrance against it when examined on the subject ; nor did he express any preference for colonising with free settlers at that or any other time. We may easily believe that, if the Government had adopted the proposal for sending out the American loyalists, he would have been at least equally pleased ; but there is no ground for supposing that he saw any objection to the substitution of convicts, still less that his moral instinct revolted against it. While, however, we feel surprise and dis- appointment when a man of his character becomes conspicuous among the patrons of a system which is now universally de- tested, it should not be forgotten that his views on the subject were not so much his own as those of the age in which he lived. It is not just to condemn even the foremost men of their time because they were not in advance of it. They must be judged by the recognised standards of their day, not by those of our own. All through the eighteenth century, the transportation system flourished in the sunshine of public and parliamentary opinion. The only protests against it came from the American colonists, who not only saw but felt its hideous iniquity; but their remonstrances were never heard in England — or if heard were never listened to. Like the cries of India that Burke spoke about in 1 783, they were " given to seas and winds, to be blown about over a remote and unhearing ocean.'' The feeling that ran through the colonies on this subject has been so carefully excluded from modern history that its existence has been for- gotten ; but if evidence of it is required, it may be seen in a letter from one of the colonists which appeared in a history of New York written in 1756 — see p. 556. They were made to feel Digitized by Google