Either with some money the convict has
secreted, or from the bounty of some old acquaintance, the assigned
servant, now relieved for the first time for some months from personal
restraint, eludes the vigilance of his new master, finds his way into a
public-house, and the first notice the settler has of his servant, for
whom he has travelled to Hobart Town, for whose clothing he has paid the
Government, for whose comfort he has, perhaps, made other little
advances, is, that he is lodged in the watch-house with loss of half his
clothing, or committed to gaol for felony."
The members of the anti-emancipist party in New South Wales attribute
the increase of crime in that colony partly to alleged relaxation of
convict discipline under Sir Richard Bourke; partly to the action of the
Jury Laws, which permit persons who have been convicts to become jurors;
and lastly, to the increasing number of emancipists.
The first-mentioned cause of the increase of crime in New South Wales
refers to the Quarter Session Act, passed in 1833; by that Act, the
summary jurisdiction of single magistrates over convicts, was somewhat
diminished, and a magistrate was prevented from inflicting more than 50
lashes for a single offence, instead of 150 which he might have given
before at three separate inflictions.
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