JB/116/298/001

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VII. Expirees
Security?

settlement, without sufficient legal powers, may be referred to
negligence and incapacity. But applying it with such remorseless
perseverance to this particular illegal use—the confinement
of British subjects contrary to law—is not only a most indisputable
crime—but a crime without the shadow of an excuse.

Ignorance of the law is that sort of excuse which in practice
is scarcely admitted, so much as in alleviation of punishment,
on the part even of the meanest subject—and in no case
where the fact of the ignorance (a fact so deplorable natural in the
present boundless and shapeless state of the laws) is ever so
strictly true. How vain and unavailing as well as how shameful
would be any such excuse on the part of those who, thus
taking the laws to break on pretence of executing them, have
had the lifeless members of each violated law for ever before their
eyes!—

In all those transactions—in all this time—it is in the nature
of the case that the system of illegal detention such as it is, should have been carried
on in the present Colony, otherwise than in consequence of, and in
general in conformity to sent fr received from home?

Much argument does not seem necessary, to prove that the
difference, between punishment of this sort for a limited term and
punishment of the same sort for life, was no secret to those by
whom it was obliterated in practice. But by a particular fact a
sort of impression will often be made, beyond any that can be made
by general inference.—

In September 1794 in a single page an account is given of
no fewer than sixteen Convicts existing at one time (one, in from
a hundred two two hundred or some such matter) in whom symptoms
of reformation had been supposed to be discovered.+ p.391 It is almost
the first discovery of the kind mentioned and I believe quite
the last: unless, in the instances of the few permissions of departure
granted to Expirees, the recognition of such a change may, as far as
those instances go, be supposed to be included. The pentitents here in
question were Non-Expirees: to different individuals amongst them,
different and very carefully measured, degrees of indulgence were
extended. To one of them (William Leach) whose "term" under "his
"sentence of transportation" had been for seven years, of which term
a part

Identifier: | JB/116/298/001 "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	298	Info in main headings field	n. s. wales
Image	001	Titles
Category	copy/fair copy sheet	Number of Pages	2
Recto/Verso	recto	Page Numbering	d25 f81 / d26 f82
Penner	john herbert koe	Watermarks	1800
Marginals		Paper Producer
Corrections	jeremy bentham	Paper Produced in Year	1800
Notes public		ID Number	37831
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