Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/92

 were brought out, their uniforms stripped off and replaced by the convict dress; iron-spiked collars and heavy chains, made expressly for the purpose by order of the governor, were rivetted to their necks and legs, and then they were drummed out of the regiment, and marched back to gaol to the tune of "The Rogue's March." Sudds, who was in bad health at the time of his sentence (from an affection of the liver), overcome with shame, grief, and disappointment oppressed by his chains, and exhausted by the heat of the sun on the day of the exposure in the barrack-square died in a few days. Thompson became insane.

A great outcry was raised in the colony: the opposition paper attacked, the official paper defended, the conduct of the governor. The colony became divided into two parties. Until the end of his administration, Sir Ralph Darling, whose whole system was a compound of military despotism and bureaucracy, was pertinaciously worried by a section which included some of the best and some of the worst men in the colony. Combining together for the extension of the liberties of the colony, they found in the Sudds and Thompson case "the inestimable benefit of a grievance."

It would be unjust to consider Sir Ralph Darling's sentence by the light of public opinion in England. He was governor of a colony in which more than half the community were slaves and criminals; he had to punish and to arrest the progress of a dangerous crime; but he fell into the error of exercising, by ex post facto decree, as the representative of the sovereign, powers which no sovereign has exercised since the time of Henry VIII., and violated one of the cardinal principles of the British constitution, by rejudging and aggravating the punishment of men who had already been judged. At the present day it is, as we before observed, only as an historical landmark that we recal attention to this transaction, which can never be repeated in British dominions.

During General Darling's government further successful explorations of the interior were made, both by private individuals and officials. Among the latter were Major (now Sir Thomas) Mitchell, Mr. Allan Cunningham, Mr. Oxley, and Captain Sturt, the most fortunate of all. In his second expedition, in 1829, Captain Sturt embarked with a party in a boat on the MorrumbidgeeMurrumbidgee [sic] (which receives the waters of the Macquarie, the Lachlan, and Darling), until he came to its junction with the Murray, an apparently noble stream. Pursuing his voyage, in spite of many impediments, hardships, and dangers, from rocks, snags, sandbanks, and hostile savages, he reached the Lake Alexandrina, and discovered the future province of South Australia. This