the Government were throughout the passage of the Bill supported by H. G. Bennet,[1] and that the whole work of the opposition was left to Sir James Mackintosh.[2]
Bigge's work was finally completed by a Bill passed in the following year dealing with the government of the convicts.[3] By its provisions the Governor of New South Wales was empowered to establish out-settlements and to send thither those convicts who appeared in need of severer discipline, and whose bad example was likely to influence other prisoners.
This statute, which embodied the remainder of Bigge's recommendations (except for a few minor changes in administration which were carried out by the instructions of the Secretary of State), brought to an end the period of Macquarie's rule, which formed the final phase of military government in New South Wales. Macquarie himself had returned to England in 1822, burdened with the consciousness that not only colonial opinion but that of Ministers also was opposed to the main object of his Governorship, namely, the social re-establishment of the emancipists. Indeed the prominence given to this one aspect caused much of the disinterested energy which he had thrown into his work to be overlooked, and for the time being he was judged only as the patron of the emancipated convicts. It is, indeed, almost solely in this light that his work is still regarded by Australian writers.
The preceding pages, however, have shown him dealing with problems of many kinds, problems intensely difficult, and requiring for their successful solution ability and training of a rare kind. For example, the granting of licenses and of remissions of sentences, the distribution of land, and the enforcement of convict discipline were all matters in which skilful administration was requisite, and it was scarcely surprising that a man who had spent his whole life in the military service should prove himself unable to originate or control administrative expedients
- ↑ See his speech, Times, 8th July, 1823.
- ↑ A further clause giving power to the Governor, "on the affidavit of an unknown informant," to send any convict who had just completed his sentence to England without trial appears to have been dropped, probably as the result of a petition presented through Sir James Mackintosh by Eager. See Hansard, House of Commons' Journal, 2nd July, 1823, pp. 1400-1403.
- ↑ Geo. IV., cap. 84.
