JB/116/290/002

Click Here To Edit

66 10 VII Escapes

no business with them: and this misdelivery not performed by one
person only, but by an unspecified number of persons, perhaps at
the same time, perhaps at different successive times. Be this as
it may, the affidavits of the claimants were taken, and by the candour
and discernment of the Judge Advocate, the alligations were
with the highest appearance of reason regarded (it seems) as true:
and indeed they could scarcely have been otherwise, unless the
intelligence of an omission, such as no human ingenuity could
have imagined, had found its way to persons in the situations
of the Convicts: a fact, neither probable in itself, nor stated as
such by Captain Collins.-

In the England the presumption is always, if the so
much vaunted, and too often even superstitiously pursued, law maxim
is to be believed, in favorem libertatis. Here, at the antipodes, where
justice is turned topsy-turvy, the the presumption was -in favorem
servitutis. In this preposterous state of things were so many
things that were illegal had been rendered necessary, judgment,
if accompanied with a due share of candour, is perpetually at a
stand. But a proposition about which there can be no difficulty, is
that this abomination, if the result of pure negligence, and not contrived
on purpose by the same astuti, whose astutia had devised
this quiet mode of making and amending the laws of Parliament,
belongs at any rate to the credit of those founders and Confounders
of Colonies

Note continued.

"It must be acknowledged" (continues this humane Magistrate and
candid Historian) "it must be acknowledged, that these people were
"most peculiarly and unpleasantly situated. Conscious in their own
"minds that the sentence of the law had been fulfilled upon them,
"it must have been truly distressing to their feelings to find that
"they could not be considered in any other light, or received into any
"other situation, than that in which alone they had been hitherto
"known in the settlement."

---page break---

Identifier: | JB/116/290/002 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 116.
Date_1		Marginal Summary Numbering
Box	116	Main Headings	panopticon versus new south wales
Folio number	290	Info in main headings field	n. s. wales
Image	002	Titles	note
Category	copy/fair copy sheet	Number of Pages	2
Recto/Verso	recto	Page Numbering	d9 f65 / d10 f66
Penner	john herbert koe	Watermarks
Marginals		Paper Producer
Corrections	jeremy bentham	Paper Produced in Year
Notes public		ID Number	37823
Box Contents