attained so very lately in the penal colony of New South Wales, even during the period of his sentence of transportation,—subjecting the characters of various officers of His Majesty's Government to general suspicion, from alleged connivance at his delinquencies; occasioning the dismissal of various respectable magistrates from the commission of the peace, for investigating these delinquencies somewhat too minutely; occupying the time of courts of justice and benches of magistrates for weeks together, and thereby commanding all the while the exclusive attention of the press and the public; and finally raising up a formidable party in the colony for the countenance and protection of vice and villany;—that a state of things, implying so enormous a perversion of justice, should be permitted to subsist at the present moment in any part of the British empire, is (to say the very least of it) as strange in itself as it is disreputable to the British nation. Talk of the tendency of transportation as a species of punishment! It would, indeed, have been miraculous if transportation had been found conducive in any degree to the prevention of crime and the reformation of criminals, under a system of management so thoroughly monstrous.
