or's permission. There he was again concerned in
an official dispute: his ticket was withdrawn; he absconded, was retaken
and flogged--and thus dropped down to the degraded condition which his
enemies desired, and which was certainly not undeserved.

The attempt to identify Bourke with this man was an artifice of faction.
The license he received was not unusual, and his previous character had
been free from colonial offence. His influence resulted from his
ability: his principles were the current notions of the emancipists; nor
is it easy to discern how talents, such as he was supposed to possess,
could be prevented from finding their level.

About this time Dr. Lang established the _Observer_. Its object was to
write down the emancipist partisans, and the journals subject to their
power. The good service performed by this earnest censor was not without
alloy: and in his attacks on their moral reputation, he seemed sometimes
to write what they themselves might have written. The emancipists were
drawn together by common sympathies: they charged the free settlers with
attempting to exact from the sufferings and failings of their brethren,
a consideration in the colony, to which they were entitled neither by
their rank nor their reputation. Nor was this reflection always without
reason: in strange forgetfulness of the natural operation of self-love,
the upper classes of New South Wales expected multitudes, often of
greater wealth than themselves, to walk humbly in their presence. Such
claims the emancipists met with defiance. The false morality of their
journals will be largely ascribed by a calm enquirer to retaliation and
hatred, rather than to a judgment corrupted--in reference to the real
nature of crime.[220]

Nothing so powerfully contributed to rouse the attention of the empire,
as the charge of Judge Burton, delivered to the petty jurors, at the
close of the criminal court, 1835. Perhaps a more awful picture was
never drawn, or a more serious impeachment pronounced against a people.
This celebrated speech furnished the text of examination, when
parliament once more enquired on the subject. Judge Burton asserted
that the whole community seemed engaged in the commission or the
punishment of crimes. Crimes, including 442 capital convictions in three
years: crimes of violence, murders, manslaughters in drunken
revels--deliberate perjuries, from motives of revenge or reward, were
brought to light. He complained of the