mental change of system. The relaxation of penal discipline, which the real friends of the colony have to complain of and to deplore, has been of forty, and not merely of four years' continuance; and it must be evident to every candid person, whether in New South Wales or in England, that in proportion as the colony increases in wealth and population, and especially in convict population, the effects of that relaxation must only become more evident and more intolerable. But Sir Richard Bourke is a whig, and the late governor was a tory; and as the whigs have abolished the tory practice of paying for sound political principle in eligible grants of land, in the assignment of valuable convict servants, and in other indulgences in the Australian colonies; it is natural for those who find themselves reduced by these reforming measures to the level of other men, to be much more sensitive to crime on the part of their convict servants, and to political delinquency on the part of their rulers, than they ever were before.
