exceeds any reasonable allowance to these causes, and thus supports the argument of the colonists, that the transportation system is to them a very costly heritage, to say nothing of its other evils.
But as to these other evils, of course this greater ratio of expense for the detection and repression of crime, means a greater ratio of crime itself. Thus the commitments, for felonies and misdemeanors, to the supreme court and sessions in England and "Wales, taking the five years 3851-55, averaged yearly 1 in 668 of population, while in New South Wales the yearly average of the five years 1858-62, gives 1 in 433; and in Victoria (1859-61), the still worse result of 1 in 375.[1] Indeed, with respect to England and Wales, taking a subsequent period, namely, the six years 1856-61, the yearly average is so comparatively small as 1 in 1,093; but the comparison is to some extent unreliable, through the operation of the Criminal Justice Act of 1855, which extended to magistrates the power, with consent of the prisoner, of dealing summarily with certain cases of offence, instead of sending them to juries.
VI.—Large Ratio in Victoria; the Game.
Let us here observe, that Victoria appears in this comparison more unfavourably as to crime than even New South Wales, notwithstanding that the latter was originally a convict settlement, and for a long time the head quarters of the system in the southern hemisphere, and that Victoria was free from the outset. The seeming anomaly requires explanation. Victoria is situated, as before stated, just between the two great seats of the convict system of past days—New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land—and was thus always exposed, upon either frontier, to the influx of the convict population, whether "runaways" or "expirees," as the bond and the freed of this unwelcome class of immigrants were respectively termed. Under these circumstances, a terrible experience awaited Victoria upon the discovery of the goldfields. The convict class streamed over in thousands from Van Dieman's Land, as from an open gaol; and crimes of the most shocking and alarming atrocity became of almost daily occurrence. During the year 1853, when this state of things was at its height, there were no less than 554 persons of this class convicted for fresh offences in the colony; the whole population at the time averaging about 200,000. We have thus 11 in every 361 of population, or nearly three times the proportion of the convictions in England and Wales; and we must further bear in mind, that, in addition to all this extraneously derived crime, as we may in some sense call it, the colony had still the crime proper to its own society to endure and dispose of.
- ↑ Mr. Rolleston, Registrar-General, New South Wales, for year 1862. The superior condition of South Australia is exemplified (year 1862) by 1 in 628.
