The Three Colonies of Australia/Part 1/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI.
SIR CHARLES FITZROY.
1846 TO 1850.
SIR CHARLES FITZROY, a younger son of the Grafton family, and a brother-in-law of the Duke of Richmond, who had previously been Lieutenant-Governor of Prince Edward's Island, and Governor of Antigua, in the West Indies, succeeded Sir George Gipps in August, 1846; Sir Charles M. O'Connell, Commander of the Forces in New South Wales, having administered the colony during the intermediate space of a month.
Sir Charles Fitzroy, who has retained the office with increased dignity as Governor- General, under the Australian Reform Bill, is in every respect the reverse of Sir George Gipps. His talents are not above mediocrity, and his manners are conciliatory. On colonial politics he has no opinions and no prejudices; apparently his chief object has been to lead an easy life. It is said that on landing he exclaimed—" I cannot conceive how Sir George Gipps could permit himself to be bored by anything in this delicious climate." Sir Charles is in fact an eminent example of how far good temper and the impartiality of indifference, in the absence of higher qualities, may make a very respectable colonial governor. By placing himself unreservedly in the hands of men of colonial experience—by yielding every point left to his own discretion by the home government to the wishes of the majority of the Legislative Council—and in fact by never taking the trouble to have any opinion on any colonial subject, has glided over difficulties on which men of more intellect and obstinacy would have made shipwreck. And perhaps, after all, the sporting, four-in-hand driving, ball-giving governor,
"A dandy of sixty, who bows with a grace,"
and leaves the political part of his work to his secretaries and law advisers, is the best governor for Australia,—until some nobleman or great commoner can be found of common sense and conciliatory manners, not only able to initiate the business of colonial government with advantage to the dependency and the parent state, but to teach the rising generation of Australia by example, that without a taste for art, 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 the Port Phillip district the increase of flocks and herds had been so rapid as to place the proprietary of squatting runs in great difficulties for want of labourers; and they had consequently formed an association, made a subscription, and imported about two thousand expirees and ticket-of-leave holders from Van Diemen, to supply their urgent demand for pastoral servants. With a view of controlling these whitewashed criminals, the Legislature of New South Wales (which until 1850 extended over Port Phillip) proposed to subject the Van Diemonian importations to a system of registration and surveillance similar to that to which the ticket-of-leave men were subjected who had originally been sentenced to New South Wales.
The home government declined to sanction a colonial legislative act, which would have made such a registration legal.[1]
But although pastoral proprietors, anxious to preserve and multiply their fleecy treasures, were willing to accept the services of convicts, just as some of them had endeavoured to introduce Feejee cannibals, by a new slave trade, and Pagan Chinese, there was a large free population in the towns of Australia which was satisfied to depend on free emigrants for the supply of labour, and determined to resist the return to convictism. With the educated and wealthy opponents of white slavery were banded the labouring classes, who naturally were just as anxious to keep wages up as their employers were to keep them down.
It was then—in the commencement of a contest between that portion of the population resident in towns or engaged in agriculture, which, on moral and political grounds, objected to the renewal of transportation, backed by the labouring classes, who were equally averse to the reduction of wages and to the vexatious police regulations incident to the system of prisoner labour which affected all labouring men, and the squatters, to whom cheap and obedient labour was essential if they were to retain their wealthy and dominant position while the respective parties had scarcely marshalled their forces, that a despatch arrived from Mr. Gladstone, in which he requested the governor "to submit to the consideration of the council whether they would not accept, in part supply of the labour market, a renewal of a modified system of transportation." Mr. Gladstone had already determined to discontinue transportation to Van Diemen's Land for two years, pending the arrangement of a better system; and also to found, on northern Australia, a new penal settlement.
On the 13th of October a committee of the Legislative Council was appointed, on the motion of Mr. Went worth, which contained, of ten members, five squatters and two colonial officials.
The first act of this committee was to meet and decide that it was not expedient at that late period of the session to take any evidence as to the question in Mr. Gladstone's letter "Whether a modified and carefully-regulated introduction of convict labourers will be in accordance with the general sense of the colony." Accordingly they confined their labours to inquiring from the employers of labour whether they would like a renewal of transportation that is to say, cheap labour they were unanimously answered in the affirmative, provided the transportation was accompanied with certain precautions which they mentioned and inquiring from the police magistrates in what manner and on what terms such transportation ought to be renewed. Although while the committee was sitting, a number of petitions against the renewal of transportation were presented, no witnesses holding the opinions of the petitioners were examined.
Among other witnesses called was Captain J. Innes, stipendiary magistrate at the convict barracks, and superintendent of irongangs, a gentleman whose office and position alike secured him from any sentimental terror of convictism, and induced him to acquiesce as much as possible in the views of those home authorities from whom he received his appointment. But Captain Innes only ventured to propose, as the terms on which the colony should consent to receive a limited number of prisoners, "that the colonial government should have the power of settling the rules for the management and discipline of the prisoners;" "that the home government should pay half the police, and gaol, and administration of justice expenditure, the cost of the penal establishments in the colony, and send out one male and one female immigrant for each prisoner and all the female convicts, so as to keep a parity of sexes."
From the same evidence we learn that at that period (1846) there were about fifteen hundred old convicts "the very worst class of men imaginable" still remaining in the gangs and gaols; and that in the colony there were 13,400 ticket-of-leave holders. The committee reported, too late for the council to take their recommendations into consideration, to the following effect:—
They commence by observing that—
The committee, after arguing in a very forcible manner against anything in the nature of probation gangs or other aggregation of criminals, "whether for the execution of public works generally, or making and repair of roads," proceed to report—
"1st. That no alteration shall be made in the Constitutional Act, 5 and 6 Vict. c. 76, except with the view to the extension of the elective principle.
"2nd. That the transportation of male convicts be accompanied, as a simultaneous measure, with the importation of an equal number of females, to consist of female convicts as far as they exist, and the balance to be made up of female immigrants.
"3rd. That, as a further simultaneous measure, such. transportation be accompanied with an equal importation of free immigrants, as nearly as possible in equal proportions as to sexes.
"4th. That the wives and families of all convicts receiving permanent or temporary indulgences should be brought out, and count as part of this free immigration.
"5th. That no fewer than five thousand male convicts be annually deported.
"6th. That the ironed or road gangs of criminals under colonial sentence, and the convict establishments of Norfolk Island and Cockatoo Islands should be maintained as heretofore at the cost of the British treasury.
"7th. That two-thirds of the expense of police, gaols, and the criminal administration of justice be paid by the home government; but that on the relinquishment of the land fund and all other revenues or droits of the crown to the appropriation of the governor and Legislative Council, the whole of this branch of convict expenditure be assumed by the colony, with a view to aid the British government in defraying the cost of the free emigration stipulated for in the second and third conditions.
"8th. That in order to insure due permanency and efficiency in the regulations to be provided for the government and discipline of convicts, the sole power of making such regulations be vested in the governor and Legislative Council, saving entire the royal prerogative of mercy.
"The description of convicts the colony should agree to receive on the above conditions are—
"1st. Young delinquents who have committed first offences to be sent after little or no probation.
"2nd. Convicts who have committed grave offences, after a probation, under the separate system, considered adequate to the crime.
"3rd. Convicts at the commencement of their sentences who have committed various crimes.
"4th. Convicts with tickets of leave (if any) from Van Diemen's Land.
"The committee recommend that—
"The two first classes receive tickets of leave entitling the holders to dwell in some particular district, altogether excluding them from towns.
"The third class to be assigned in the nineteen counties in which pastoral pursuits were most followed and the squatting districts, to parties into whose character rigid inquiry had been made."
The committee express a preference for assignment over probation for the second class.
With respect to the Van Diemonian ticket-of-leave men, the committee state that they would rather not receive them at all, but that a system of granting conditional pardons very indiscriminately having been very extensively practised, they would prefer receiving men subject to registry muster and the surveillance of the police, to receiving them without any restraint at all.
In another part of their report the committee observe, "The secret to disarm transportation of its evil influences is to increase the free population," that it may always maintain a decided ascendancy, and to keep up the equality of the sexes, that the colony may never more be subjected to the horrors of a populus vivorum"
It seems that at that period the males of the colony were 114,000 to 74,000 females.
The committee conclude with an eloquent peroration, no doubt the work of their accomplished chairman, on the beneficial results to be anticipated from their recommendations.
This report having been issued too late to be discussed by the Legislative Council, was forwarded by the government to the Colonial Office, and fell into the hands of Mr. Gladstone's successor, Earl Grey.
EARL GREY.
Sir Charles Fitzroy, warned by the error of Governor Gipps, in his first address to the Legislative Council, assured them that he should defer any legislative action on his own part until he made such a stay and such investigations as were "necessary to acquire personal experience upon several momentous questions upon which it would be presumptuous to offer any opinion at so early a period of our intercourse;" and he added:—"I take this opportunity of publicly declaring, in perfect sincerity, that I have assumed the responsible trust with which our Sovereign has honoured me, unfettered by any preconceived opinions on every subject affecting the interests of any class o her Majesty's subjects in this territory."
Among the important subjects affected by this timely and sagacious declaration stood foremost the renewal of transportation; the upset price of crown lands; the terms on which those lands were to be temporarily occupied by pastoral proprietors; the control and appropriation of the colonial revenues; and the establishment of steam communication.
On all these and many other colonial subjects, as we learn from a work recently published by the noble earl, Lord Grey had fully made up his mind, with that instinctive intuition peculiar to those who are "swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into legislators."
And here we must pause in tracing the progress of the transportation question to describe the minister who has had so large a share in alienating the affections of the Australian colonists from the mother country, and in elevating into patriots of the hour those unprincipled agitators who found, to their infinite satisfaction, in the anti-transportation cry the means of preaching sedition.
Lord Grey, as Lord Howick in the House of Commons, early became a convert to the brilliant plausibilities of Gibbon Wakefield's land theory. He took an active part in the South Australian Committee of 1841, and in 1845 he vehemently supported the attack made in Committee and in Parliament on Lord Stanley and Sir Robert Peel's government by the New Zealand Company, and had a large share in securing to that corporation a renewed lease of the powers they exercised so injuriously to the interests of their shareholders and their colonists.
On his accession to the Colonial Office his first step was to break up the colony contemplated by Mr. Gladstone in Northern Australia.
In reply to Sir Charles Fitzroy, Earl Grey declined to accede to any of the conditions suggested by the Transportation Committee, except that which stipulated for the emigration at the expense of the mother country of a number of free emigrants equal in number to the convicts sent; but he suspended any action until the decision of the Legislative Council should be pronounced.
In the meantime the Legislative Council, in the session of 1847, had considered Mr. Went worth's report and rejected it.
In the same year Earl Grey wrote to the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Sir William Denison, "that it was not the intention of her Majesty's government that transportation to Van Diemen's Land should be resumed at the expiration of the two years for which it has already been decided that it should be discontinued." The Governor, Sir William Denison, took the sentence in its literal sense, and announced the good news in terms which caused general rejoicing. But although it appeared in the sequel that Earl Grey had never meant to discontinue transportation, but only to have convicts on the shores of Van Diemen's Land as exiles—that is to say, convicted emigrants or ticket-of-leave men, instead of concentrating crime in probation gangs,—he took no measures to disabuse, to correct the mistaken reading of the governor, until the time came when transportation was openly renewed. In actual fact, although the number of criminals sent to Van Diemen's Land was diminished, transportation never was discontinued during the proposed two years, but prisoners who had passed through a course of penal discipline in English gaols were landed and almost immediately set at liberty, either as exiles or "ticket-of-leavers," to the extent of 3,154 between 1846 and 1848.
The despatch from Sir William Denison, informing the Colonial Office that he had announced the abolition of transportation to Van Diemen's Land, and that to revive it in any form would be a breach of faith, was received at the Colonial Office on the 5th February, 1848. The receipt was acknowledged by Earl Grey, by a despatch on the 27th April, 1848, in which, without reprimanding the governor for the sincealleged misconstruction of the despatch, which seemed to announce that transportation was to be discontinued, he thanked the governor for his valuable information, and, without preamble, announced that prisoners would be sent out with tickets of leave. From that period, without interruption up to the present time, the free colonists of Yan Diemen's Land have never ceased to agitate and protest against the system, with such unanimity that at the first general election under the new constitution no single member was returned who did not pledge himself to resist to the uttermost the continuance of transportation; and this in the face of opposition from candidates who were supported by all the influence of a government expending upwards of £100,000 a year.
It is quite true, as Earl Grey states in the apology for the failure of his colonial policy, which he has lately addressed to the (colonial) ignorance of the British public, that there were gentlemen in Van Diemen's Land who, sharing the patronage of the government, openly approved of this wholesale transportation. It is extraordinary, with so large a government expenditure among a community so limited, its supporters were not more numerous, and it is equally true that there were always employers to be found willing to engage the cheap labour provided by ships laden with "ticket-of-leavers." But cheap labour will always find customers, whatever the quality or morality. The pest and crime-breeding cottages of Dorsetshire, denounced by the Rev. Sidney Godolphin Osborne—the seven-shilling-a-week life, with a workhouse burial, as the goal of Wiltshire labourers—the employment of women in mines, and the unlimited hours of labour in factories, have, in turn, met with apologists as well as supporters. So in Van Diemen's Land, those who fertilised their lands or derived wealth from the moral cesspool approved it, and not unwillingly saw it overflow the neighbouring colony.
A key to the unpopularity which in Australia attended Earl Grey's administration of the Colonial Office, may be found in the communications which passed between certain elective members of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, who were chosen a corresponding committee, and the parliamentary agent or representative of the colony, the Hon. Francis Scott, M.P., from which we shall presently make some extracts.
But as regards transportation, in 1848, the Legislative Council received some accession of strength from the squatter party; the colony was in straits from the cessation of immigration, which had fallen from some six thousand in 1842 to barely three thousand two hundred during the whole five years of 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846, and 1847, and ventured to pass a resolution assenting to a proposition made by Earl Grey, by which he undertook to forward a certain number of criminals who had passed through a course of discipline in British penitentiaries, to be landed with tickets of leave; and further to accompany their immigration with that of an equal number of free emigrants to be sent, not at the cost of the Colonial Land Fund, but of the British Exchequer.
The passing of this resolution was the signal for the organisation of a fierce agitation against the renewal of transportation, which was kept alive by the arrival from time to time of small bands of felons under the new name of exiles.
Sir Charles Fitzroy's despatch, enclosing Mr. Wentworth's resolution in favour of the renewal of transportation, reached England in August, 1848.
The financial state of the country deterred the English government from proposing the vote needful for defraying the expenses of the free emigrants promised to the colony, in consideration of their receiving convicts. Had the compromise been strictly fulfilled by Earl Grey, and accompanied by such measures as would have prevented the convicts from remaining in towns to compete with free labourers, it is possible that convictism might have been endured for some years longer; at any rate until the discovery of gold rendered transportation to Australia absurd as a punishment. But Earl Grey, in a defiance of public opinion in the colonies, as exhibited in a crowd of petitions, resolutions, and reports of public meetings forwarded to him, as well as in the universal tone of the colonial newspapers, adopted that part of the bargain which suited the mother country, and neglected to fulfil the colonial conditions on which the concession was made. He decided to send out prisoners but no free emigrants—revoked the order iu council of 1840, by which New South Wales had ceased to be a place for the reception of convicts—and commenced to send out the pets of Pentonville and Parkhurst.
The publication of this despatch in the colony was received with one universal outburst of indignation. A passage at the conclusion of the communication, in which Sir C. Fitzroy was told that "if the Legislative Council should object to receive convicts without free immigration at the expense of the home government according to the stipulation of the compromise, the transmission of convicts would be stopped, and application made to parliament for the means of fulfilling the original promise," was considered as approaching insult, because it was evident that -during at least nearly twelve months between the penning of that despatch to the receipt of an answer, transportation must flow on. From that time compromise was impossible; the breach of faith became a potent rhetorical weapon in the hands of political agitators. The excitement and fury of all parties was such, that it only needed the presence of an obstinate and haughty governor to provoke a rebellious outburst. Fortunately Governor Fitzroy preferred a pleasant day on the race- course to any assertion of vice-royal attributes.
In 1849, the Hashemy convict-ship arrived in Sydney harbour. At one of the largest public meetings ever held in that city, speeches of the most violent character were delivered, and resolutions passed, calling upon the governor to send back the cargo of England's crimes to England. At the same time certain of the great flockowners—the political Buckinghams and Newdegates of the colony—eagerly engaged the ticket-of-leave men, tamed somewhat by penitentiary discipline, and all unencumbered by wives and families, at lower wages, in preference to a thousand free emigrants, consisting of men, women, and children, who arrived at the same time.
In the latter end of 1848 the results of distress in England and famine in Ireland were felt in Australia in the shape of an inflowing of free emigrants more numerous than had been received since the frantic mania of 1841; and this was increased to such an extent in 1849, that little short of thirteen thousand labouring people were landed in Sydney, and an equal number at Port Phillip. An addition of many thousand free emigrants to the population could not fail to produce an effect on the anti-transportation feelings of the colony. It is self-evident that when emigrants begin to flock freely into a colony, the period for employing convict labour has passed.
In 1849, the Legislative Council answered Earl Grey's extraordinary reading of the compromise offered him in 1848, by voting an address to the Queen in which they protested against the adoption of any measure by which the colony would be degraded into a penal settlement, "and entreated her Majesty to revoke the order in Council by which New South Wales had been again made a place to which British offenders may be transported." That in this address they only echoed the feelings of the great majority of the colonists was proved in the next election, when gentlemen with the highest claims to the honours of Legislation were rejected on the one ground of having supported the transportation compromise.
Earl Grey, in his recent apology for his colonial policy, treats this absolute reversal of the compromise previously offered as something marvellously inconsistent, if not unprincipled: his own "error of judgment" in sending the poison without the antidote, he treats very lightly.
But Earl Grey writes like a man whose political position and still more his tone of mind remove him altogether from those influences which affect popular assemblies. During his official career he had no constituents; no equal cared, no subordinate dared, to controvert his fixed ideas on all colonial subjects; and when colonists ventured in deputation to urge unpleasant arguments, we have ourselves witnessed with what impassive, incredulous sternness he bowed them out!
Earl Grey takes some pains to marshal the respective elements of the pro and anti-transportation parties; he performs his task in a manner which reminds one of the instruction for a brief given, according to an old circuit story, by an attorney to his new clerk "our client, the plaintiff, is a most respectable baker, the defendant is a rascally cheesemonger."
And so Earl Grey declares, that the "minority in favour of the renewal of transportation included no small proportion of the most intelligent and enterprising members of society," whilst the majority against included not only those "who sincerely entertained the repugnance they professed on moral grounds, but a great number of the labouring classes who were influenced by jealousy of the competition of convicts, and a fear that their coming might lead to a reduction of the extravagant wages they had been in the habit of obtaining. Others, again, for personal or electioneering objects, thought it their interest to excite popular passions. The anti-transportation party in the interval since the subject was previously considered in the Legislative Council gained the ascendancy, assisted in no small degree by the diminished urgency of the demand for labour, in consequence of the large free emigration."[2]
It is worthy of note that the dearth of labour which had prevailed in previous years, was owing entirely to Earl Grey's refusal to adopt the measures pressed upon him by "the most intelligent and comprising colonists," and that the supply of labour was due, not to his commissioners, but to the English distress and Irish famine. But in order that those not conversant with colonial affairs may not be imposed upon by the strenuous efforts of Lord Grey to extenuate a course of policy which, if pardonable in a novice, is quite unpardonable in a statesman, we venture on the following parallel passage from English History:—
An administration, of which Earl Grey formed one, offered to compromise the corn-law question by offering an 8s. duty. That offer was rejected by the agricultural interest in 1842; while in 1848 nothing less than the total and immediate abolition would satisfy those who would once willingly have accepted the 8s. compromise, those who in 1842 had rejected it disdainfully would have been only too willing to accept it. In the same way the party who carried the repeal of the corn laws, was composed of some who sincerely approved of it on moral and political grounds, others who were chiefly moved by the prospect of increased trade, and others who saw in the movement personal and political advantages and the way to the enjoyment of extravagant official salaries.[3]
It would be difficult to find two passages in cotemporary history more alike. When Earl Grey reads colonial events with such singular one-sidedness, it is not surprising that he did not observe that the party in favour of the renewal of transportation was composed of those whose income would be increased by hundreds and thousands per annum by a reduction of the price of labour to £16 per annum—who would never be brought in contact with the convict element—who could afford free butlers and ladies' maids—whose sons would not associate and whose daughters would not be entrapped into marriage with Pentonville exiles or ticket-of-leavers.
The obnoxious order in council making New South Wales a penal colony was, after a brief contest, withdrawn, but the seed of agitation had been sown, the anti-transportation league, embracing all the Australian colonies and Van Diemen's Land, had been organised. The gold discoveries proved to every one, except to the son and heir of the great man who carried the Reform Bill, that transportation was not only odious to the colonists but absurd as a punishment. Within the present year it has been abolished by the Duke of Newcastle. But Earl Grey, like his countryman, the gallant Whittington, still fights upon his stumps, and endeavours to perpetuate the bitter dislike with which his official career was regarded in the colonies, by proclaiming that as regards Van Diemen's Land he would not, had he continued in power, have yielded to either gold or agitation; nay, more,—that he would have created the Moreton Bay district into a separate colony for the express purpose of enabling the squatters—whom his land policy has fixed in possession of that fine country to the exclusion of yeomanry—to accept the convicts whom the colonists on the whole line of coast eastward have agreed in rejecting.
Such are the leading facts of the Anti-Transportation Question, one of several which formed the subjects of bitter contest between the colonists and Earl Grey during the administration of Governor Fitzroy. Of the seeds of distrust, almost of sedition, then sown, we fear we have not yet seen the full fruit.
- ↑ One of the first acts of the Legislative Assemblies created by the Australian Reform Bill of 1850, was to pass similar acts levelled against Van Diemonian expirees.
- ↑ Colonial Policy, by Earl Grey, vol. 2, p. 47.
- ↑ We do not consider that the secretaries of state are by any means extravagantly paid, but it is very likely that a colonist might. And we do not agree -with Earl Grey that the wages of colonial labourers are to be measured by a Northumberland standard, for what is extravagant in England is moderate in a new country.