and was not returned in the new Parliament in 1821. Strictly he belonged rather to the Radical left than to the regular Whig opposition, and he took a prominent position on questions of prison reform and criminal law. Miss Martineau refers to him in conjunction with Sir Francis Burdett as a popularity hunter, and one of those who made "frenzied declamations against individual members of the Government".[1] This, indeed, appears to have been his favourite form of debate, and not particularly liked by some who supported him. "Bennet very coarse but very strong," Wilberforce records in his diary on one occasion.[2] He used to be coached in his Parliamentary business by Francis Place. "I told Bennet," he wrote in 1819, "from the first that I should wear him out, that he would be obliged either to shun me or lead a dog's life with his party. He said, 'No,' I said 'Yes'. He has done so. But next session he will come again, and as he certainly means well, I shall be pleased to see him."[3]
In these slight criticisms, and in the light of his writing and speeches, Bennet appears as a rather blusterous Radical of no remarkable ability, but active, clever, and ready to take up the cause of those he thought oppressed. The official Whigs, as Place observed, disliked him; and he rather shocked the gentle Wilberforce. He was, however, very active in the cause of New South Wales, and in these years not without influence in its affairs. When in 1816 the Transportation Act was about once more to expire, Bennet urged that the Bill to renew it brought in by the Government should not be rushed through the House, as had been done in the previous year. He expressed himself as opposed altogether to the principle of transportation, and proceeded to the inaccurate and startling statement, made probably on hearsay evidence only, that the whole system of management at Botany Bay tended so little to reform the convicts that "the numbers of executions in that settlement far exceeded the average of natural deaths'.[4] In the second reading Bennet spoke again to much the same effect,
- ↑ Martineau's History of the Peace, vol. i., p. 149, referring to debate on Habeas Corpus Suspension, 23rd June, 1818.
- ↑ Life of Wilberforce, February, 1818, vol. iv., p. 369.
- ↑ Life of Francis Place, Graham Wallas, p. 178. Place to Hobhouse, 16th August, 1819.
- ↑ Hansard, vol. xxxiii., p. 595, 16th March, 1816.
