dead! Such cases were not uncommon, but
they are past, and they may be left to oblivion.

Whether it is possible, in the present state of penal discipline, to
withdraw the scourge from the hands of authority, it might be difficult
to decide: it should not, however, be forgotten, that its present
comparative disuse, was once pronounced impossible; and that when
flogging decreased, crimes of savage violence became unusual.

The partisans of General Darling, many of whom were eminent, both for
their opulence and social worth, resented the constructive censure of
his policy. They asserted that discipline was relaxed; that, under the
title of the "prisoners' friend," Bourke was an incendiary, stirring up
the laborers to rebellion.[216] They predicted that the diminished
severity of transportation as a penalty, would suggest new arguments
against it in parliament, ultimately lead to its abolition, and thus
inflict a fatal injury on the colony. The press, supported by
emancipists, lauded the lenient temper of the governor, and exasperated
the advocates of the past system by allusions to their tyrannical rule,
and exultation at their defeat. The old quarrel revived: the
dissatisfied magistrates and settlers dwelt on the characteristic
depravity of the emancipists; and the necessity for their permanent
disqualification as jurors and electors. While they asserted the lasting
civil and moral distinctions between the voluntary and expiree settlers,
the patrons of the latter avenged them by maintaining that the convict
was only less _fortunate_ than his free employer, and that the moral
disparity assumed and vaunted, was rather fanciful than real.

The treatment of assigned servants in New South Wales had always been
more open to objection than Van Diemen's Land.[217] The transportation
of 30,000, during ten years ending in 1836, produced the moral evils
inseparable from such vast accumulations. Several of the settlers
employed from one to two hundred men, and it was a capital object to
reduce them to the feeling, while they were subject to the economy of
penal slavery. There were, indeed, many mitigations and many exceptions;
but the settlers at large realised less the healthy sympathy between the
master and servant than was common in this country.

A class of settlers, whose management was not less exceptionable,
chiefly expirees, surrounded the large estates; thus, while some
convicts were considered both as criminals and sla