r the same
success. Capt. Maconochie quoted Hume in describing these societies, but
he omitted those sentences which seem to give another aspect to the
institution; for when a member of the tithings was charged with a crime,
the rest could purge themselves from responsibility, if acquitted on
oath of connivance with the offender, or his escape: but, however
innocent, the clubs of Maconochie were involved in the responsibility of
the transgressor--a fundamental difference, the suppression of which was
scarcely compatible with literary candour.

Bentham himself had proposed that convicts should remain at auxiliary
establishments, in principle resembling the training stations of
Maconochie, until they could be prepared for the full enjoyment of
liberty. He also suggested mutual surveillance associations, in which
the prisoners should watch over, instruct, and assist each other.
Archbishop Whately advocated the detention of prisoners until their
reformation was established.

Maconochie attributed his idea of marks to an observation of Messrs.
Backhouse and Walker on their usefulness in training the rising
generation: they thought they discerned a faint image of the club system
at Macquarie Harbour, where devout prisoners separated themselves into a
society, and were secured from the interruption of the rest. Men from
bondage, were released in the hulks, when the sum total of marks in
their favor covered a certain period of their sentence.

Macarthur had recommended the employment of an officer, under the
immediate direction of the home secretary of state, responsible for the
full execution of a sentence, to whom the entire management of the
convict department might be committed. The governors would thus be less
likely to change the aspect of transportation, according to their
particular theories.[224]

Captain Maconochie was preceded in this branch of penal philosophy by a
gentleman, not equally celebrated, but who proposed changes as radical.
It is amusing to observe, with what different objects, and how diverse
in spirit, similar mutations have been enforced. Dr. Henderson, the
founder of the Van Diemen's Land Society, on returning to India, offered
through the press at Calcutta a new scheme of colonisation, based on
convict government. That which existed he deemed defective in its main
principles, and futile in its results. The settlers he described, with
some contempt, as an inferior class, inflated with notions of