he has been rearing, and become in every respect as great a monster as the wretch who before drove the colonists to desperation and rebellion.  Experience is the beacon of past times set up for the guidance of future; and those who shape their course by it, shall avoid striking on the rocks to which it forbids approach.  Woe to the pilot who disregards this friendly admonition, and runs on incredulous of the risk.  Soon in the midst of surrounding reefs he shall when too late repent his temerity, and wish, that content with the experience of others he had not authenticated by the shipwreck of his hopes, the folly of his incredulity, and the reality of the danger!  It is with governments as with individuals.  The institutions which have occasioned anarchy and devastation before, will, if persisted in, produce them again.  Vile and detestable as have been the monsters of antiquity, the world still contains their parallels; and if they languish in obscurity, if they have not attained a celebrity equally atrocious, it is because they possess not equal facilities for the display of their real character and propensities.  Human nature is still the same, and wherever a field is opened for the growth of tyranny, there that poisonous fungus, a tyrant, will shoot up.

But the encouragement which these courts in general hold out for the indulgence of private animosities, and their consequently imperfect adaptation to the administration of justice, are not the only reasons which may be urged for a change in their present organization.  The whole of the inhabitants of the various settlements in Van Diemen’s Land, are in a great measure placed without the pale of the law.  They have, indeed, what is termed the lieutenant governor’s court, but as I have already observed, it can only take cognizance of pleas to the amount of fifty pounds, and possesses no criminal jurisdiction whatever.  They are consequently left without any internal protection from the spoliations of lawless ruffians, and in a great measure from the scarcelyless pernicious depredations of dishonest creditors.  For although they may obtain redress in both instances in the courts established at Port Jackson, nothing but an invincible necessity will propel them to seek so distant and expensive a remedy.  The consequence is, that scarcely any but delinquents of the very worst cast, as murderers and housebreakers, are ever brought to trial; for notwithstanding all criminal prosecutions are conducted at the cost of the government, and the witnesses are paid their indispensable expenses from the police fund, still, what with the period that elapses in the voyage to Port Jackson, the delays incident to the courts themselves, and the time that the witnesses must generally wait before they can obtain a passage back again, very few of the persons who are constrained to give evidence on such occasions can possibly manage to resume their domestic occupations under three months.  This to a set of men, who are for the most part agriculturists,