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Untitled Article
whatever watchfulness of discipline ; whatever restraints , stripes , or passages of ill-luck , are growled at as so many injuries , and excite fresh tumults of dark passions . Thus is the bondage pf sin aggravated by the mismanagement of the external bondage . Instead of convict-importation being a boon to Australia , it is the most fearful curse which any country has ever dared to
inflict on any other country . It is true there have been panics from time to time among the settlers , lest Great Britain should be growing moral , lest the transportation of offenders should by any means be stopped : but this only shows the extent of the evil wrought there , instead of disproving its existence . As long as the colony has the frtiit of the body ,, she cares not for the sin of the soul . She wants labour , and as long as she has it she
cares not by whom it is yielded , whether by mocking imps in human shape , or by captives spirit-broken with remorse . Can there be a stronger proof of our iniquity in selecting a portion of God ' s earth to be the nursery of crime , the spot where guilt and misery may be so fostered as that they may speedily travel abroad , and make a hell of every place which has relations with
their special abode ? Was anything so daring ever done as establishing a depot of vice ? not a place where it is to be first imprisoned and then buried , but whence it is to be issued after an incessant reproduction and multiplication . How much there is of piety , justice , and charity in such a scheme , each may determine for himself .
As long as the mere transportation of each individual costs from 25 Z . to 35 Z ., besides the expenses of an establishment of civil and military officers and troops , it is plain that a mode of punishment more burdensome to the public in a pecuniary point of view could not be adopted . It will be seen that Dr . Whately has a goodly amount of sound argument on his side : his mode of handling it is equally
sound . As one of the nation ' s spiritual guardians , he feels it to be his duty to remonstrate against an institution which is found to create more vice and misery than it was expected to cure ; and his exposition is marked by the good sense , and his remonstrance is conducted with the dignified and benevolent feeling which render all his writings acceptable to the friends of truth and humanity . i In his Appendix are embodied most of the extraordinary revelations which have been made of the workings of the
penalcolony system . There is no need to go to the Arabian Nights ' Entertainments for wonders in these days of extensive publication of evidence . Evidence is now the true depository of the marvellous * May it prove—it certainly will prove—the source o £ the morally sublime . We look forward with dim and anxious solicitude , to discern what will spring out of the work before us , and others of the same class , that rpay tend to the moral amelioration and repose of society . . -
Untitled Article
Secondary Punishments . 669
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 669, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/21/
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