Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/187

 colonists themselves to decide whether the deportation of convicts to this hemisphere should cease or continue—whether they should at once and for ever free themselves and their posterity from the further taint of the convict system, doubtless a large majority, especially of the operative classes, would give the proposal for renewed transportation an unhesitating veto; nor do your committee feel by any means certain that the decision of the majority of the upper and middle classes of society would now also be in accordance with the report of the General Grievance Committee of 1844, 'that the moral and social influences of the convict system, the contamination and the vice which are inseparable from it, are evils for which no mere pecuniary benefits could serve as a counterpoise;' and if the Secretary of State be prepared to discontinue the transportation of the convicts of the British empire to all of the Australian colonies, and thus practically as well as nominally free this continent from their presence, such a course would be more generally 'conducive to the interests, and agreeable to the inclinations of those whom it will ultimately concern.' Seeing, however, that in the view of your committee, transportation is no longer an open question—that transportation is still to go on to Van Diemen's Land—seeing, moreover, that a new penal settlement is immediately to be formed on the very northern boundary of the colony—that thus this colony, already inundated on the south with the outpourings of the probation system in Van Diemen's Land, the most demoralising that ever was invented, is soon to have poured upon it from the north the exiles of the mother country, as well as the expirees from that colony; and that to augment the volume of this double stream of felonry, a system of conditional pardons, confining the holders of them practically to the Australian colonies, has been resorted to, with the effect of relieving the British treasury from the cost of maintaining this class of criminals in reality, although free men in name: seeing this, your committee consider the question narrowed down to whether transportation should exist in the indirect and polluted shape which it has already assumed; whether, in short, we are to have this double tide of moral contamination flowing upon us without restraint or check; or whether, along with whatever compensation transportation can be surrounded, we are to have the additional advantage of modifying and regulating its introduction into the colony by the knowledge which fifty years' experience of its working has given us, which will at all events enable us to combine with the greatest possible good derivable from it, the least possible admixture of evil."

The committee, after arguing in a very forcible manner against anything in the nature of probation gangs or other aggregation of criminals, "whether for the execution of public works generally, or making and repair of roads," proceed to report—

"As a mere choice of evils, which, whatever may be the general desire, this community has no power to escape from, we are willing to submit to a renewal of transportation upon the following terms, and upon no other:—

"1st. That no alteration shall be made in the Constitutional Act, 5 and 6 Vict. c. 76, except with the view to the extension of the elective principle.

"2nd. That the transportation of male convicts be accompanied, as a simultaneous measure, with the importation of an equal number of females, to consist