Page:The Statistics of Crime in Australia (IA jstor-2338612).pdf/5

 Victoria, however, has improved since that date. Van Dieman's Land, called Tasmania since the cessation of transportation, presents us with the heavier category of crime. The convictions for felonies and misdemeanors, are 1 in 486 of the population. We graduate in the equatorial direction through the somewhat happier ratios of Victoria and New South Wales, and only reach the smallest proportions of crime, as already stated, in semi-tropic and tropical Queensland. There the proportion does not exceed, or is even more favourable than that of England. Queensland lies out of the way of the main convict stream. The "old hands," as the earlier assigned convicts were called, and who, in the penal days of New South Wales, were often the only servants procurable for the remote pastoral stations of the northern district that is now Queensland, have mostly long since died out; and the young colony, for its erection into a separate Government dates only from the year 1859, furnishes, approximately at least, an idea of the picture our southern colonies might have presented but for the convict system. New Zealand also has been in great measure exempted from the convict influence. The committals to the supreme court and sessions, and the convictions, are respectively in about the same proportion as those of England and Wales. This condition, however, refers to times preceding the mining of the great goldfields of Otago, which began in 1861. Already, indeed, there are symptoms of declension, for the year 1862 has shown a considerable increase in the proportion of convictions. There are 145 in that year, namely, 10 felonies and 135 misdemeanors, or about i in 690. There are above 20,000 miners now at work upon these fields; and if some of Victoria's gold mining experiences are to be reproduced in New Zealand, an unbroken continuance of the happy immunity of the latter colony from any marked excess of crime is hardly to be looked for of the future. But the future will also have its improvement, as Victoria herself exemplifies, whose chief goldfields are even now the seats of considerable municipal towns, communicating with each other by roads or railways and telegraphs, and drawing with facility from their seaports, in exchange for the all-negotiable gold, the choice of the world's market for their social amenity and progress.

.—Great Crime Ratio the Effect chiefly of Transportation.

I have thus shown that these colonies present considerable diversities in regard to crime; but that these diversities are quite intelligibly accounted for by a variety of local circumstances, chiefly according as they have been severally exposed to the effects of the convict system. On the average they present a ratio of crime very considerably higher than that of this country.