[117] Ibid.
[118] Mr. Hall, a free immigrant editor, addressed a meeting of emancipists (1822), and regretted he was not one of their number!—his sincere regret that he was not an emancipist! This, it must be recollected, was after dinner.
[119] Wentworth, 2nd edit.
[120] Bigge's Report.
[121] When addressing the Secretary of State, Macquarie observes—"In my opinion (speaking of the voluntary settlers), they should consider they are coming to a convict country, and if they are too proud or too delicate in their feelings to associate with the population of this country, they should consider in time, and bend their course to some other country, in which prejudices in this respect would meet with no opposition. No country in the world has been so advantageous to adventurers as New South Wales: the free settlers, coming out as such, have never felt their dignity hurt by trading with convicts, even when they were such." Again—"It has been my invariable opinion, that a freeman, by pardon or emancipation, should be in all respects considered on a footing with every other man in the colony, according to his rank in life and character; in short, that no retrospect should, in any case, be had to his ever having been otherwise."—Letter to Earl Bathurst, 1813.
[122] Reid's Voyage.
[123] This was afterwards prevented.
[124] Macarthur's Present State.
[125] "Men are governed by words: under the infamous term convict, are comprehended offenders of the most different degrees and species of guilt. One man is transported for stealing three hams and a pot of sausages; in the next berth to him, is a young surgeon engaged in mutiny at the Nore; another, was so ill read in history, as to imagine that Ireland was ill-treated, and too bad a reasoner to suppose that nine catholics ought not to pay tithes to one protestant. Then comes a man who set his house on fire; another, the most glaring of all human villains, a poacher; driven from Europe, wife and child, by thirty lords of the manor, for killing a partridge. Now, all these are crimes, no doubt; but surely to which attach different degrees of contempt and horror. A warrant granted by a reformed bacon stealer would be absurd; but a hot brained young blockhead, who chose to favor the mutiny at the Nore, may, when he is forty years of age, and has cast his jacobin teeth, make a useful magistrate and loyal subject.
The most inflexible were some of the regiments stationed at Botany Bay—men, of course, who had uniformly shunned the society of gamesters, prostitutes, and drunkards; who had ruined no tailors, corrupted no wives, and had entitled themselves, by a long course of solemnity and decorum, to indulge in all the insolence of purity and virtue."—Rev. S. Smith, 1823.