science, and refined intellectual amusements, the most fashionable tailor, the most correct equipage, the most beautiful horses, the most stately mansion, and the most varied wine-cellar, will not make a gentleman, as colonial plutocrats often fancy.
The Earl of Derby (then Lord Stanley) had held the seals of the Colonial Office during nearly the whole period of Sir George Gipps's government, and heartily sustained him in all his needless and despotic assertions of royal prerogative. He had earned, too, considerable personal unpopularity by disallowing several important acts of the Legislative Council, by the exercise of his patronage in an arbitrary manner in favour of very improper objects, and by a general course of conduct both negligent and defiant. In 1845 Lord Stanley resigned, and was succeeded by the Right Hon. William Gladstone, who retired with Sir Robert Peel's government in June, 1846.
THE ANTI-CONVICT CONTEST.
Transportation to New South Wales had been discontinued in 1840, in consequence of the report of a committee of the House of Commons made in 1838. The class of convicts who had previously been distributed over New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land as assigned servants, following agricultural and pastoral occupations, were all poured into the island of Van Diemen's Land, and there massed into what were called probation gangs. Without separate cells or trustworthy gaolers, they festered into the foulest community that ever poisoned the population of a civilised state.
The gentlemen of the House of Commons who forced the sudden abolition of the assignment system on the government, were the cat's-paws of certain South Australian and New Zealand land-jobbers. By a coup de main they compelled the government to do that in a day which required the preparation of years. For the consequent mistakes and failures which occurred between 1840 and 1845 the Colonial Office is scarcely answerable. The experiment was new; it was suddenly forced upon them by a powerful political combination, and at that period the means of obtaining authentic information from the colonies were few and far between.
In 1845 Mr. Secretary Gladstone's attention was directed to two serious facts in regard to convictism. On the one hand the gang and probation system in Van Diemen's Land had produced a state of crime and danger fatal to the progress of the whole colony, which could no longer remain unnoticed. On the other, on the rich pastoral plains of
