Page:The Earl of Mayo.djvu/197

Rh essentials of safety. He found dissension and disobedience among the authorities; and a state of discipline that allowed a convict to accumulate a practically unlimited store of liquor, with which to madden himself and his comrades to further crime. It was a murder committed after a general debauch of this sort that led the Viceroy to reconsider the constitution of the Settlement.

The work occupied Lord Mayo's thoughts at Simla during the early half of 1871. He found that he had to create a government for a Colony 'which, assuming that only life-prisoners were sent, would ultimately contain 20,000 convicts.' In the first place, therefore, he had to put together an administrative framework of a texture that would withstand severe strain, and ensure the safety of the isolated handful of Englishmen in charge of the islands. In the second place, he desired that the new constitution of the Settlement, while enforcing a stricter surveillance and discipline, and increasing the terrors of transportation, more especially to new arrivals, should eventually allow of a career to the industrious and well-behaved; and as it were open up a new citizenship, with local ambitions and interests, to the exiles whose crimes had cut them off alike from the future and the past in their native land.

He resolved, in the third place, to establish the financial arrangements of the Colony on a sounder basis; and he hoped that the measures which raised the convicts out of criminal animals into settlers