Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/190

 country, and in elevating into patriots of the hour those unprincipled agitators who found, to their infinite satisfaction, in the anti-transportation cry the means of preaching sedition.

Lord Grey, as Lord Howick in the House of Commons, early became a convert to the brilliant plausibilities of Gibbon Wakefield's land theory. He took an active part in the South Australian Committee of 1841, and in 1845 he vehemently supported the attack made in Committee and in Parliament on Lord Stanley and Sir Robert Peel's government by the New Zealand Company, and had a large share in securing to that corporation a renewed lease of the powers they exercised so injuriously to the interests of their shareholders and their colonists.

On his accession to the Colonial Office his first step was to break up the colony contemplated by Mr. Gladstone in Northern Australia.

In reply to Sir Charles Fitzroy, Earl Grey declined to accede to any of the conditions suggested by the Transportation Committee, except that which stipulated for the emigration at the expense of the mother country of a number of free emigrants equal in number to the convicts sent; but he suspended any action until the decision of the Legislative Council should be pronounced.

In the meantime the Legislative Council, in the session of 1847, had considered Mr. Went worth's report and rejected it.

In the same year Earl Grey wrote to the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Sir William Denison, "that it was not the intention of her Majesty's government that transportation to Van Diemen's Land should be resumed at the expiration of the two years for which it has already been decided that it should be discontinued." The Governor, Sir William Denison, took the sentence in its literal sense, and announced the good news in terms which caused general rejoicing. But although it appeared in the sequel that Earl Grey had never meant to discontinue transportation, but only to have convicts on the shores of Van Diemen's Land as exiles—that is to say, convicted emigrants or ticket-of-leave men, instead of concentrating crime in probation gangs,—he took no measures to disabuse, to correct the mistaken reading of the governor, until the time came when transportation was openly renewed. In actual fact, although the number of criminals sent to Van Diemen's Land was diminished, transportation never was discontinued during the proposed two years, but prisoners who had passed through a course of penal discipline in English gaols were landed and almost immediately set at liberty, either as exiles or "ticket-of-leavers," to the extent of 3,154 between 1846 and 1848.