VIII.—Improving Condition.
But if this unfavourable view must still be taken, the condition is at all events an improving one, and by no slight gradations. Indeed there is no feature of these colonies more satisfactory than their progressive social improvement, as illustrated by the almost methodical yearly diminution of crime. I am to be understood as speaking of the whole group collectively, for, besides exceptional circumstances pointing in an opposite way, in some of the members, the case of West Australia is already presenting some of the worst features of the earlier convict settlements to the eastward, although happily on a scale less noticeable to the world and less hurtful to its neighbours.
I shall now examine some salient points of this comparative well-doing. If these colonies cannot yet take a high rank in the social scale in respect to their crime ratio, let us console ourselves in regarding the much lower position from which they have risen, and thus take reasonable assurance that the future will exceed the present, somewhat as the present has exceeded the past. The old convict leaven gradually dies out, and its diminishing influence is more and more overwhelmed by the tide of healthy immigration of the free colonists. One chief guide in our comparisons will be the proportion of convictions for the graver offences—the felonies and misdemeanors—at the supreme court and sessions.
1. Retrospect of New South Wales.
New South Wales ceased to be a convict colony in the year 1840. After that year transportation was concentrated upon Van Dieman's Land; but the former colony was left to digest, as it best could, the accumulations of more than half a century of convict immigration. The process was by no means easy, even in the superficial view of its mere pecuniary cost. The Imperial Government affected to bear its share of the burden bequeathed to the free colonists by continuing to defray the expense of convict establishments in tho colony. But so inadequately did this arrangement meet the merits of the case, that one of the earliest acts of the first representative legislature, instituted at Sydney in the year 1843, was to draw up a bill of costs on the subject against the Home Treasury—a bill of such proportions that, as "no part thereof has as yet been paid or compensated," we must suppose it was too formidable to be encountered. But as to all this accumulated convict population, when and how would it be finally disposed of, for it was being continually immersed in fresh crimes? There were consignments to chain gangs, imprisonments by the thousand, lashes by the hundred to each back, executions by the half dozen of a morning. The colony has bled,
