FOOTNOTES:
[275] Report of Hanwell Institution, 1842.
SECTION XXVII
Whatever details are omitted from the foregoing pages, nothing has been withheld necessary to complete a colonial view of transportation. Errors may doubtless be detected; but as they have not resulted from carelessness or haste, it is hoped they will be found both unimportant and rare.
The views expressed by various parties on the subject of transportation are modified, or even wholly suggested by their interests. The English peer rejoices that sixteen thousand miles of ocean divide him from the "wretch" who entered on his preserves, or dragged his rivers, and is at rest; the citizen is glad that one burglar less lives in his neighbourhood, and considers that transportation is indispensible to the safety of plate. The colonist farmer regards convictism as a labor power; the working emigrant as a rival labor market; while the officers in charge naturally cloak its evils and exalt its efficacy.
It is nearly impossible for a stranger to estimate the weight of testimony, so prejudiced throughout, and nearly as impossible for a writer, interested in the issue of its discussion, to preserve the unclouded judgment required to arrive at truth. But little reliance can be placed on official statistics: they give imperfect views of moral or industrial results. They have often been compiled by government for specific purposes, or by agents unworthy of confidence.
It may be proper to point out the chief difficulties which beset this branch of penal jurisprudence. Some of these have been long noticed by authorities on political philosophy. From Paley, to the latest speculators on transportation, all have noticed its inequality. They have dwelt on the uncertainty of its details—from the differing habits and original condition of those subject to its infliction; and from the absence of supervision, only to be expected where those who direct the sentence secure its observance. The convict is condemned to a penalty which may subject him to predial slavery, to capricious punishments; to brutal taskmasters, and to the antipathies of a caste; or he may be regarded with compassion, good-will, and even preference: the sting of the law may be taken away, and what was a penalty may constitute a brotherhood.
Thus it happens that no uniform description is a true one. What may correctly delineate the aspect of transportation on one class, may be false in reference to another; what may be facts one year, may be an exaggeration in the year following. This inequality has been partly the result of the law. The relation of the convict to the free has been constantly changing. He was a bond servant; he was permitted to compound his servitude by a daily payment; he was allowed to work partly for himself and partly for the crown, at the same moment. He has been restrained in government gangs; he has lodged in barracks, and worn the coarsest dress, or he has lived in his own hired house. Sometimes treated as a public enemy, chained, flogged, and over-worked; at others, petted as a favorite or soothed like a child.
The public policy has depended on causes which have had little relation to the individual character of convicts. A mild or severe governor, or secretary of state; a great increase or decrease of numbers; the book of some literary idler, or of an angry colonist; instances of extraordinary good fortune, or an insurrection against tyranny; the fluctuations of feeling at home, sometimes wrath against crime, sometimes compassion for the criminal. Such are the causes, traced in the incessant agitation of penal transportation.
Two incompatible objects have been always professedly embraced—intimidation and reform; but while they have both animated the scheme, they have struggled for the ascendancy, and the one or the other has seemed to be the chief, if not sole, motive of government. The Australian seal expressed the design of mercy: it was to oxen ploughing—to bales of merchandise, and the various attributes of industry, that Hope pointed the landing convict, when she broke off his bonds. Fifty years after, Lord Stanley deemed many years spent in chains, a just punishment for crimes against property, or others of no deep dye.
The changes of systems have been usually based on facts and opinions, elicited during those paroxysms of reform which occur generally once in ten years. Thus the improvement of discipline; the efficiency of convict labor; the several efforts to restrain its attendant vices; have usually occurred when some old officer has been superseded; and others have devoted to their novel duties the first vigour of their zeal.
The whole spirit and apparent object of convict discipline has been revolutionised several times. In the vicissitudes of English factions a new secretary of state has had power to sift and overturn the expedients of a rival. It has rarely remained beyond a few months in one stay. For four or six years, during the governorship of Colonel Arthur, transportation reached its highest perfection. It was rendered uniform, by the imperial confidence reposed in his judgment; more so by the demand for labor, by the rapid influx of capital, and by the common interest of the government, the colonist, and the well-doing prisoner. It would be difficult to find half that period undisturbed under any other ruler.
Many difficulties connected with transportation are created by natural and social laws: full of mercy to the human race. The sufferings inflicted by man cannot reform man: he cannot carry out the vengeance of another, for wrongs he neither endured nor saw. His heart melts at the sight of distress, and forgetting general principles, says, in the absence of accusers, "neither do I condemn thee;" or if forgetful of a common nature, he punishes with inflexible severity, while the iron enters the soul of his brother his own heart is seared. Thus, again, a nation cannot send away her criminals, and yet make their punishment exemplary; she cannot detain them in masses, without rendering them a scourge; she cannot discharge them to live under a clement sky and amidst abundance, without meeting everywhere the reproaches of the honest poor. Thus beset on every side, she is taught that crime is not an excrescence to be cut off, but a disease to be cured; and that to increase the comparative penalty of guilt, more than liberty must be forfeited. She must offer something better to her paupers than the benefits of disgraceful exile.
In reference to practical results, almost every theory may be sustained by the records of transportation, if one class of facts only are admitted into view. Thus it has been pronounced by men distinguished and intelligent, as an expedient worthy an enlightened statesman, and gratifying to the most ardent though scrupulous philanthropist; but they have often omitted sections of facts which, resting on evidence not less deserving regard, excite astonishment, disgust, and horror.
Whether the judgment of Governor Arthur was correct on the main question, or not, he doubtless pointed out the great difficulty. His words are well worthy remembrance:—"Sanguine as I am of the beneficial results of transportation, and confident as I feel that it may be made to surpass any other secondary punishment, both as relates to the criminal and to the country from which he is banished,—I cannot lose sight of many imperfections of our present system, some of which are bottomed on a state of things which no human ingenuity can rectify:—'you cannot make that straight which God hath made crooked.'"[276]
A few men of the generation survive, which witnessed the departure of the first fleet of convict vessels to a country then a wilderness, and inhabited only by savages. The stranger, who lands where they first pitched their tents, will survey the scene and consider the question of transportation determined. The shipping which crowd the harbour; the public and private buildings rivaling the architecture of Europe; the spacious churches, filled with well-dressed families; the extensive thoroughfare, thronged with business and equipages, and adorned with elegant shops and offices; the courts of law; the public markets; the London cries; the noise of the hustings; the debates of the assembly. Such are the alleged results of transportation: as if by some vast effort the people of an old country had transferred the seat of empire, and were collecting all that art could devise and wealth could bring. Should the visitor extend his enquiries, he will find vessels trading to many neighbouring and kindred cities. They all owe their existence to that first fleet. Sometimes they repudiate their origin; but they bear evidence that their giant youth has learned from the experience, and risen in part under the auspices of the great convict country. Should the traveller extend his travels to Van Diemen's Land, he will hear the same tale of penal transportation, and its wondrous effects in former times. He will pass over a road made after scientific plans, and bridges of costly structure. He will see orchards, in which mingle the blossom of the cherry, the apple, the pear, and the peach; and gardens green with British vegetation. This successful spread of the English name, language, commerce, and power, has required less than the life of man. Many survive, who were born when the first sod of Australia was turned by the hoe of a banished Briton. The man even now seen sauntering along, chained and moving sullenly to labor, is but a continuation of that army who first broke in on the solitude of a new world; laid the first foundation, and planted the first field.
Should the traveller still extend his enquiry, his astonishment and delight will not be diminished. The swarms of children rushing from a village school participate the blood of men, some of whom were once a terror to society, or of women who were its reproach. In the lists of religious societies, commercial companies, jurors, magistrates, will be found traces of their lineage. What could hope have anticipated beyond these realities!
But the connection between these successes and transportation, is rather co-incidental than of cause and effect. Were it supposed that seventy years would have elapsed prior to the occupation of these countries, but for transportation, the advantage must be calculated not by actual achievements but the value of that advanced starting point, which colonisation now possesses. It is not improbable that colonisation would have commenced at a much earlier date: the first ships of free settlers would have been more intelligent; their attention to the resources of the country more earnest. The second quarter of a century had half expired, when the Blue Mountains ceased to be a barrier to the colonists of New South Wales. The dawning of a new world must have attracted the national mind, had not an unexampled society, abandoned to vice and crime, appeared to the people an object of dread and horror.
The progress of the colonies, until 1830, cannot be considered rapid. The first settlers were, individually, prosperous: many emancipists were wealthy; but for the rest, their houses were mean, their commercial arrangements pedling and insignificant; their public buildings generally miserable. It is from the date of emigration that progress has been conspicuous: and that date is but recent—a progress in a ratio vastly greater than any previous cycle. The great colonies of Port Phillip and South Australia, before that time, were hardly in existence.
If, indeed, no capital had been introduced; no whalers collected the treasures of the deep; no free emigrant arrived; no free colonies erected; then the improvements of this quarter of the globe might be ascribed to penal laws; but they have the same relation to its present prosperity as the numerous parts of an edifice have to each other—not such as of the oak to the acorn. When, therefore, it is stated that transportation has been the making of these colonies, it should be rather said it was the cause of their establishment. The outlay of the crown, although great, has been small compared with the outlay of the people. The chief settlers of the convict colonies were capitalists; they gave themselves to cultivation, which, in most instances, has involved them. Agriculturists are poor: it is the shepherd prince who is rich. He may be benefited a few score pounds by labor artificially supplied; but nature is the great patron of his house.
The chief connexion between transportation and progress is in the government outlay; but that has been less than apparent; it has often been the mere difference between an English and a colonial price; it has been attended with great consumption without equal re-production. It has sometimes had no other effect than foreign commerce on the places of depôt and transit. The price of labor, when labor was chiefly supplied by transportation, was often very high. Thus a farmer found one man with rations and clothing; but a person, working in the same field, received £30, £40, or even £60 per annum. The price of labor was therefore often, on the whole, sufficient to absorb the capital of the employer.
There are many wealthy landowners, who are, however, the sole representatives of those numerous fortunes lost by London firms in these colonies. The court of insolvency made that which was foreign, colonial property. The rich freights sent from Europe, when not wasted by an extravagant consumption, were really exchanged for land improved, and finally disappeared from the ledger of the merchant. It remains—not as the result of convict labor, but as the dividend of an expenditure which shews more loss than gain.
The value of convict labor has been generally overestimated. "The day that sees a man a slave, deprives him of half his worth." The employers, as a class, are uniformly poor. Slave labor in America is dearer than free, although it implies no moral degradation.[277] What then could be expected from bondmen of the same colour as their lords; whose resentment and indolence combined to prevent their usefulness. It may be safely affirmed, that the employer who gained by his servants, not only watched, but paid them.[278] Instances may be found in opposition to this conclusion: the great employers, who reduced their men by an unrelenting pressure, were few in number; and their advantages were of brief duration.[279]
The ordinary settlers purchased convict labor at great sacrifices, which they never estimated. They lived in woods, often without religious instruction, medical attendance, and in want of those refinements which can be realised only when the stern features of the wilderness are softened by neighbourhood and civilisation. Who can value the toil and time, and wear and tear of life, in bringing the stubborn, ignorant, and vicious to drive the plough and reap the harvest. Other colonists, in other lands, with less capital, but with free labor, have thriven faster; and attained a prosperity far less compromised by debt, and far more durable.
A very great quantity of property has been destroyed by crime and vice. It is commonly said that theft merely changes ownership, and does not detract from the aggregate of wealth; but the thief is not only idle, his expenditure is reckless; he wastes more than he consumes.
Many colonists of former years spoke of the arrival of prisoners with gladness, and seemed to regard the punctual supply of a certain but increasing number as a boon. The minds of these persons usually dwelt solely on the advantage of coercive labor, of military and prison expenditure, and the prisoner was regarded as a "productive power." When ashamed of sordid calculation, they discovered a defence in the blessedness of expatriation to the offender. His food was greater in quantity, and better in quality, than he could obtain by industry in a crowded country. His liberty restored, fortune became often auspicious, and the temptation, to rude roguery ceased. He took his side with the laws; he married, and educated his children; he attended the house of God, and became serious; he rivalled his master in liberality and public spirit. Multitudes died in hospitals and in prisons; but they were forgotten, and the fortunate only were conspicuous.
The public works performed by convict labor, though sometimes extensive and important, will appear inconsiderable, if compared with the imperial or colonial cost. The deep cuts and massive bridges, which please the eye, are yet disproportionate to the traffic, and produce no adequate return. The proportion between free and bond labor, is as 2 and 3 to 1. Task labor has been commonly found incompatible with discipline, or liable to favoritism and official dishonesty: the overseer "approximates" or guesses, when not inclined to reckon. Day work is still less satisfactory: the pick is slowly uplifted, and descends without effect. The body bends and goes through hours of ineffectual motion; or if the rigour of discipline renders evasion penal, the triangles disgrace a civilised nation, and the colony is filled with violence and vengeance. Yet convict labor has, generally, been deemed important to an infant settlement; to secure a combination, without which preliminary stages of colonisation are slowly passed. Such has been its undoubted use; but who, with the prodigies of modern enterprise before him, will assign to bond labor a peculiar efficacy, or doubt that well directed capital can ensure all that force can effect.
The industrial enterprises of the crown have been utterly unsuccessful: they have been the laughter of the colony. Examples might be given in abundance; but it is needless to prove what has been never disputed. Convicts have been employed by the authorities as ship-builders, masons, hop-growers, and cultivators; but the general results would have involved any less opulent proprietor in ruin.
Nearly 120,000 prisoners have landed in these colonies; of these, the major part have passed into eternity. Thousands have died in chains; thousands and tens of thousands perished by strong drink. Their domestic increase, compared with equal numbers of free persons, is insignificant—partly by the effects of vice, and in part by the impracticability of marriage: they melt from the earth, and pass away like a mournful dream. In every parochial burial-ground there is a large section of graves, where not a tomb records who slumber there.
The nursery is the natural hive of arts and agriculture. The sons of the farmer, when they commit him to the dust, occupy his fields, and the little one becomes a thousand. There are several families in this colony, more than were the sons of Jacob when he lodged in Goshen; but convicts, for the most part, die childless.
In delineating the character of an exile population, a broad line must be drawn between the accidental offender and the hereditary robber. To the first no special description will be applicable: they are often not inferior to the ranks from which they sprung. Though a small section of the whole, they present not the least affecting picture among the many sad sights of a penal land. In the folly and recklessness of youth they lost at once their fame, their honor, and their freedom. The statesman may behold only a mass of outcasts; but among them are many whose names are the burden of a father's prayer, or are traced in deep lines of sorrow on a mother's breaking heart.
Transportation confounds men of entirely distinct character in one common penalty. Thus every variety of disposition, and every grade in life may be discovered. A proportion, certainly not considerable, obtain the respect and influence due to benevolence, integrity, successful toil: a much larger number exhibit only the common faults of uneducated men, and acquire the common confidence suited to their original station.
The character of convicts cannot be safely inferred from their sentence. Thus highway robbers were not unfrequently the best conducted men: they exhibited a courage and resolution which, directed aright, became useful to society and to themselves. The petty thief, often detected in his least offence, proved incapable of shame or gratitude. To an English reader, preference expressed by masters for persons under heavy sentences, would appear inexplicable; but it was founded, not on length of servitude alone, but a not uncommon superiority of disposition. Those transported for agrarian offences and political crimes, were often honest men. The rustic insurgents of 1832, were considered valuable servants. The Canadian prisoners conducted themselves with exemplary decorum.
Among those who belong to the class of habitual offenders, a large proportion are intellectually deficient. These unfortunate beings regularly return to crime on their discharge; incapable of resisting temptation: while prisoners, they are perpetually involved in difficulties. A very bad man will pass through the different stages of his sentence without reproach, while the weak-minded are involved in endless infractions of discipline and successive punishments. Nothing retards the release of the artful villain when his time is expired, while the warm and incautious, but better man, accumulates a catalogue of prison penalties.
The most civil and useless prisoners are the Irish: the most base and clever are the Scotch. They stand in different relations to the law: the Scotchman violates his own judgment, and offends, against knowledge; the Irish peasant unites a species of patriotism with his aggressions.
The modern convict is, in some respects, better than his predecessor; less ruthless, or prone to atrocious violence. Civilisation has extended its mollifying influence, even to the professional robber. On the other hand, in former times, men were transported for very trivial offences: poaching, with its consequences, formed the leading crimes of the English counties; yet many poachers were otherwise first-rate men, both in disposition and physical development. The modern convicts are, more generally, criminals in the popular sense. The abolition of capital punishments, and the erection of penitentiaries at home, left the penalty of transportation chiefly to more serious offences.
The tendency to particular crimes is often curiously displayed. Prisoners are safe amidst scenes which present no allurements adapted to their former habits: the pickpocket is perfectly trusty as a shepherd; the housebreaker makes a confidential dairy-man. Old temptations are fatal: even the stealing particular goods seems a special propensity. A woman, lately convicted of stealing blankets, who was originally transported for blanket-stealing, had twice stolen the same article in the colony. It is, of course, in the same department that the robber, the coiner, or the receiver of Europe, resumes in Australia his antagonism to the laws. These characteristics are happily often obliterated and overpowered.
The Christian will not doubt that reformation is possible, and that many once neglected and unfortunate, placed under the guidance and encouraged by the countenance of benevolent men, acquire both the principles and habits of ordinary society. The affections of domestic life are all awakened. The parent feels a new interest in the world: his share in the common prosperity excites the sentiment of patriotism. He promotes his children's education with unusual care; but it is at this stage of life that his heart endures a pang which legislators never contemplated.
The occasional prosperity of the transported person has been the opprobrium of the laws. He rises above his former condition; becomes a master where he was a bondman; patronises public amusements, and rides in his chariot past the pedestrian who received him in bonds. Great changes in condition are common everywhere: but transportation presents the whole career of the exile, from the bar to the civic hall, as parts of the one drama. A pardoned offender is lost in the population of Great Britain. Were the changes in his fortune noticed, it would occasion no reflection on the laws; but when numbers ascend under the same auspices, their prosperity is flagrant, and stands in ludicrous contrast with the predictions of the magistrate, who opened up a field of successful enterprise when he pronounced the sentence of transportation.
The colonial aspect of transportation is, to a British statesman, a secondary question: thus the injury of a distant community is of inconsiderable importance. If the expatriated classes carry out with them their ignorance, disorder, and crime, they retard the progress and destroy the reputation of a distant country, but the nation may still be satisfied: she may balance the evil and the good, and find herself the gainer. The colony is injured; but the parent country is saved. Thus transportation not only removes the habitual criminal, it extinguishes the embers of insurrection: it prevents the dreaded war between property and poverty, and silently withdraws a mass of dangerous discontent.
Of those transported a great proportion, if in England, would be in prisons; or, if at large, preying on the world—following their old calling, as burglars, coiners, and sheep-stealers. They would be active incendiaries and anarchists: they would be out at every riot, and by throwing their numbers into the scale of sedition, overturn all order, and even change the constitution. Such have been the conclusions of English statesmen: perhaps, partly founded on their fears, or stated for effect; but not wholly unsupported by analogy.
While some exhibit a convict colony as depraved beyond all examples of depravation, others lower the standard of human virtue, and not only extenuate its evils but magnify its worth. It was asserted by Lord Stanley, that the feeling of caste guarded the habits of the free. A view so flattering to human pride could hardly fail to be confessed; but, in fact, familiarity with crime, although it may not corrupt the judgment, must abate the moral sensibility. No colonist can forget his shudder at the first spectacle of men in chains: none can be unconscious that the lapse of years has deadened the sense of social disorder. It has, indeed, made many doubly circumspect, and awakened a peculiar interest in the ordinances of religion. Nor is it to be doubted that many expirees, disgusted with the enormities of vice, have, under the same feeling, contributed to set up the indispensable land-marks of honesty and religion.
Never were families guarded with more care, or efforts to educate the population more earnest, than during the inundation of the probation system. The external decorum of the Sabbath, the general attendance of the free inhabitants on worship, would go far to countenance the idea that the place of peril is the place of caution and prayer.
Ministers of the crown are, or profess to be, astonished that when the freed population increases, and the territory is explored, a country, still needing labor, should object to the prisoner supply; but the slave-holding interest expires, when immense numbers can be held no longer by a few: the common views of mankind re-assert their ascendancy. All, save employers, are hostile to degraded labor; employers themselves become less interested as masters than as colonists.
But transportation to one country cannot continue for ever. The causes which suggest the exile of offenders will occasion their rejection: money or labor may bribe the settler to become an overseer for the crown; but from the beginning he will calculate on a nobler vocation. A considerable community cannot be tempted by convict labor: and the numbers who regain liberty are enemies to the social state they have escaped. Fathers, who for themselves dreaded no dangers, tremble for their children: the adventurer becomes a citizen; a merchant, a politician: and the time approaches, when the same causes which induced the parent country to send the first convict vessel, will impel the colony to send back the last.
The late expedient of Earl Grey, is the trial of a scheme long present before his imagination.[280] Its rejection by the Australian continent has limited the experiment to Van Diemen's Land, where resistance is unavailing. It is the last achievement of penal philosophy, and will ascertain how long one small portion of the earth can receive the liberated masses, gathered by the penal laws of a mighty empire!
The ticket man lands; the colony is crowded with his predecessors; the colonists consider his arrival a grievance; the government, ignorant or careless of his fate, cast him into new temptations. Under such a plan the emigrant is gradually superseded by the exile population: the emancipated laborer is expelled by a fresh ticket holder. The country-born youth finds himself unable to live in his native land. The tone of public morals follows the prevailing spirit: crime is currently spoken of merely as a fault or a misfortune; the press teams with vicious sentimentalism; the administration of justice becomes more uncertain, perjury more common; the reputation of the colony is formed from the census, and the land becomes a by-word and a hissing.
Such, then, is the scheme which originated in philanthropy; such the practical result of years of laborious inquiry and official debate!