Deferring to the strong feeling excited by their appeal, Bourke appointed an enquiry. The evidence collected did not sustain the charges of the men, who probably mistook their position, and exaggerated their grievances; but their accusations made a deep impression on a certain class, and the tyranny of the settler magistrates, of whom thirty were dismissed from the commission, was denounced with increasing boldness and asperity.
Among the most effective writers of the time, was William Angus Watt, who held up the angry magistrates to derision, and their partisans, "as a faction dwindled to a shadow—
A mumping phantom of incarnate spite;
Loathed, but not feared, for rage that cannot bite."[219]
The career of this man is a curiosity of Australasian literature. Both Dr. Lang and Major Mudie have spread his fame by their works and their parliamentary evidence. He committed a crime in Scotland, for which he was outlawed; for a second, in London, he was transported. At Wellington Valley he won the favor of his superintendent employed in an office at Sydney, he conciliated the good-will of Bishop Broughton and several other clergymen, who interceded for his pardon. This was refused, but he obtained a ticket-of-leave, and engaged in the service of the editor of the Gazette, the reputed organ of the government. The profligacy of his habits, and the insolence of his writings, exposed him to observation. He lived with a female illegally at large, whose child, born in the factory, was baptised in his name. To involve the editors of the Herald in a prosecution for libel, Watt procured, by the agency of a printer in their office, a slip proof of a letter they had resolved to suppress. This he transmitted through the post to the person calumniated, to give him the necessary evidence of publication. For his share in this scandalous trick he was tried, but the paper stolen was of so little value that he was acquitted. In addressing the jury, he pointed out Major Mudie as his unrelenting persecutor, and as an oppressor of unfortunate prisoners. Mudie, to punish the alleged insolence of his defence, accused him of immorality and habitual lying, and demanded the revocation of his ticket-of-leave. The investigation lasted several weeks, and ended in the dismissal of the charge, which was not unfairly attributed to the animosities kindled by newspaper warfare, in which Mudie was more than a spectator. Judge Burton represented that the residence of Watt in Sydney was pernicious, and Governor Bourke ordered him to the district of Port Macquarie; whither he was followed by the proprietress of the Gazette, with whom he married, by the governor's permission. There he was again concerned in an official dispute: his ticket was withdrawn; he absconded, was retaken and flogged—and thus dropped down to the degraded condition which his enemies desired, and which was certainly not undeserved.
The attempt to identify Bourke with this man was an artifice of faction. The license he received was not unusual, and his previous character had been free from colonial offence. His influence resulted from his ability: his principles were the current notions of the emancipists; nor is it easy to discern how talents, such as he was supposed to possess, could be prevented from finding their level.
About this time Dr. Lang established the Observer. Its object was to write down the emancipist partisans, and the journals subject to their power. The good service performed by this earnest censor was not without alloy: and in his attacks on their moral reputation, he seemed sometimes to write what they themselves might have written. The emancipists were drawn together by common sympathies: they charged the free settlers with attempting to exact from the sufferings and failings of their brethren, a consideration in the colony, to which they were entitled neither by their rank nor their reputation. Nor was this reflection always without reason: in strange forgetfulness of the natural operation of self-love, the upper classes of New South Wales expected multitudes, often of greater wealth than themselves, to walk humbly in their presence. Such claims the emancipists met with defiance. The false morality of their journals will be largely ascribed by a calm enquirer to retaliation and hatred, rather than to a judgment corrupted—in reference to the real nature of crime.[220]
Nothing so powerfully contributed to rouse the attention of the empire, as the charge of Judge Burton, delivered to the petty jurors, at the close of the criminal court, 1835. Perhaps a more awful picture was never drawn, or a more serious impeachment pronounced against a people. This celebrated speech furnished the text of examination, when parliament once more enquired on the subject. Judge Burton asserted that the whole community seemed engaged in the commission or the punishment of crimes. Crimes, including 442 capital convictions in three years: crimes of violence, murders, manslaughters in drunken revels—deliberate perjuries, from motives of revenge or reward, were brought to light. He complained of the deficiency of religious principle: of the neglect and profanation of the sabbath: on which day the worst actions were planned and perpetrated. The convict stations he compared to "bee-hives, diligently pouring in and out; but with this difference—the one worked by day, the other by night: the one goes forth to industry, the other to plunder." These evils he traced to "squatting;" the congregation of prisoner servants in Sydney; the license of improper persons to public houses; and, more than all, the total neglect of superintendence by employers of convicts, who, armed for marauding expeditions, sometimes left their masters' premises by night, and even by day. He closed, by declaring his love to free institutions—the pride, indeed, and boast of England; but which, if conferred on such a populace, he believed would end in the corruption of all.
That this address gave a true description of a part of the population, cannot be doubted; but inferences were liable to error, even on the spot, much more when drawn at a distance. A mass of thieves under any system, if in contact with property, must produce a mass of crime; yet even in the worst days of transportation, the relapses were proportionately less than under any other system of prison discipline. In England, 30,000 such persons at large, would yield annually at least an equal number of felonies.
The abuses which were brought to light, were certainly flagrant: the most memorable was the instance of Nash, who took to Sydney the rich spoil of a robbery, and set up a large drapery warehouse; and of Gough, an assigned servant of the chief justice, who lived at large, and carried on a quiet business as a receiver of stolen goods. Cases so conspicuous strongly illustrated the evils of assignment. The miserable fate of Mudie's men, compared with the condition of such persons, naturally suggested the idea, that some new change was essential, to protect from reproach or derision the public justice of the nation.
The appointment of a committee to promote emigration from Ireland, of which Archbishop Whately was chairman, called attention to the subject of transportation. It was the opinion of the committee (1836), that to send the peasantry of Ireland to a community so polluted, was base, cruel, and impolitic. The right reverend prelate asserted that statesmen were tolerating a social organisation, destined one day to involve the empire in deep disgrace, and exhibit the awful spectacle of a nation of criminals!