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!