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employed all your geometry in reducing to its minimum this great load of
patronage. But my Contractor, a plodding trading kind of man, who, as
such, understands that vulgar science (saving all respect) vulgarly called
trap, still better, would find out, by the instinct natural to men of his class
the art of pushing that reduction just so far as it ought to be pushed, and
no farther. Officers and Governors, eo nomine, he would have none: and any
superflous clerk or over-looker, who might be found lurking in his establishment,
he would have much less tenderness for than your Gardener has for
the sow-thistles in your garden. The greatest part of the his science comes
to him in maxims from his grandmother: and amongst the foremost of
those maxims is that, which stigmatizes, as an unfrugal practice, the
keeping of more cats than will catch mice.
If under all these circumstances the Penitentiary-houses should
have been something of a bug bear, it will be the less to be wondered at,
when one considers the magnitude of the scale upon which this complicated
experiment was going to be made. I mentioned in round numbers
nine hundred, as the number of convicts, that was going to be provisioned
for, but 888 was the exact number mentioned in the Bill. —
Three eights "thus arranged a terrible shew!" But granting this
be the number likely to require provision of some kind or other, it sure
does not follow, that all that require it must necessarily be provided
for in this manner, or in none. If the eight hundred and eighty
eight appear so formidable, gentlemen may strike off the hundreds, and
try whether the country will be ruined by an establishment inferior
that which an obscene ex-countryman of theirs is going to amuse himself wi
What I have all along been taking for granted is, th
it is the mere dread of extravagance that has driven your thrifty min
-ter from the Penitentiary-house plan, not the love of transportation that
has seduced him from it. The inferiority of the latter mode of punishment
in point of exemplarily, and equality, in short in every point but that of ex
-ence, stands, I believe, undisputed. I collected the reasons against it that
were in every body's mouth, and marked them down, with I think some ad
-tions, as you may, or may not remember, in my view of the Hard-Labour B
Supplement included. I have never happened to hear any objections made to these reasons: nor ha
I heard of any charms, other than those of antiquity, and comparative fr
-ality, that transportation has to recommend it. Supposing therefore, wha
I most certainly do not suppose, that my Contractor could not keep his
people at home, at less expence than it would take to send them abroad
yet if he could keep them at no greater expence, I should presume that
even this would be reckoned no small point gained, and that even th
very moderate success would be sufficient, to put an end to so undesira
a branch of navigation.
Nor does any preference that might be given to the transportation
plan supersede the necessity of this or some other substitute to it in the many cases, to
which it cannot be conceived that plan should be extended. Transportation
to this desert for seven years, a punishment which under such circumstances is so mu
like transportation for life, is not, I suppose, to be inflicted for every pec
-dillo. Vessels will not be sailing every week or forthnight upon this four
five or six months navigation: Hardly much oftner, I should suppose, than once
twelvemonth
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Identifier: | JB/550/223/002 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 550.
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