simply; and I have no doubt that the numbers on whom it is annually inflicted will at least swell the grand total of persons convicted of various criminal offences during the year 1817, either by the criminal courts, by the benches of magistrates, by the superintendent of police, or by the district magistrates to one thousand.  We may now draw some sort of a comparison between the amount of crime in the years 1806 and 1817.  I should imagine, on the highest calculation, that not more than one hundred persons in addition to those tried by the criminal court during that year, could, from the system then in practice, have been summarily dealt with by the magistracy; but allowing even that there were two hundred, and that the whole number of persons stated by Governor Bligh to have been tried by that court were found guilty, a most improbable supposition, the year 1806 will only then give a total of three hundred and sixteen offenders, i.e. not one third the amount of those who were convicted in the year 1817.  Crime therefore has been trebled, while the population has only been doubled, or in other words, the increase of the former has been to the increase of the latter as three to two.

[* Page 42 Appendix to the Report of the House of Commons in 1812.]

What else, indeed, could be expected from a system which is every day enlarging the circle of poverty and distress?  Is it within the possibility of belief that people should become more honest as they become more necessitous?  That they should scrupulously refrain from making inroads on the possessions of their richer neighbours, while they themselves are suffering under the influence of progressive penury?  Under such circumstances it would be the very height of absurdity to expect an increase of virtue and honesty.  Wherever it is not within the compass of industry to provide for its wants, a recourse to crime in order to make up the deficiency is inevitable to a certain extent even in a moral country.  What then must be the result of this inability in a felon population, long habituated to theft, and naturally predisposed to criminality?  In such a community as this, the government are doubly bound to neglect no measures which may be calculated to repress this vicious propensity.  If they adopt the contrary line of conduct; if they administer stimulants to vice instead of anodynes; if they, in fact, create incitements to dishonesty too potent even for virtuous misery to withstand, are not they the authors of a system thus impregnated with corruption, virtually the parent of the monstrous litter to which it gives birth?  And though according to the inflexible principles of justice, any violation of the property of another is not to be exculpated, humanity will always pity the distressed delinquent, and wish that she had the power of substituting the primary author of the crime in the place of the condemned criminal.  How would the world be reformed, if the framers of the unjust and impolitic laws, which are every where the bane of mankind, and the cause of so much misery and vice, were arraigned at the bar of justice, and compelled to answer for all the depravity that might be traced to the demoralizing influence of their measures?