of minor offences: and its degradation, unfelt by old offenders,
was agony to men of minds more sensitive. The bad were little punished,
the good demoralised; self respect was destroyed; and men born to better
things, sacrificed by political institutions, rather than by their
personal depravity or their crimes. This state was worse than negro
slavery: the interests of the masters were less permanent; who, though
they did not fear their servants, disliked, coerced, and inveighed
against them. This slavery tainted colonial life: the colonists were
harsh and overbearing at home; they were quarrelsome neighbours, given
to reckless assertion; rapacious, envious, and disaffected. Government
was unpopular, and all governors so in succession. The police, if not
corrupt, was irksome and intrusive. Labor was wasted, emigration
discouraged. Crime and drunkenness multiplied, and what a hundred and
fifty is to one thousand, or thirteen hundred, such was the crime of
Van Diemen's Land to that of England and Scotland. Drunkenness had
risen, in ten years, from three per cent. to fourteen per cent.: in
London, such was the difference of tendencies between those meridians,
it was reduced to an imperceptible fraction.

To remedy these evils, he demanded the abolition of domestic slavery: a
separation, distinct as their natures, between punishment and moral
training; punishment, certain and appropriate--inflicted upon system,
and in seclusion; and training, not less systematic, but social and
probationary--coercion being banished, moral influence alone applied.
For punishment, Maconochie deemed the system of Port Arthur,
administered by Booth, an admirable model. For training, he suggested
stations within reach of the free community, where the convicts should
be prepared for society in parties of six, joined in a common fate, by
mutual agreement. They were to work out their redemption together: their
vigilance would detect, their interests depress disorders in the clubs;
the virtues of sobriety, diligence, decency, and industry, achieved by
each, would be rewarded for the common benefit of all; but for the fault
of one, the whole would pay the penalty; or should the partnership be
dissolved by the intolerable injustice of any, its disbanded members
would return to their starting point, and in new combinations pursue
again, and perhaps again, the first steps, until all should reach
abreast one common goal.

Such was the system of moral tra