home, sometimes wrath against crime, sometimes compassion for
the criminal. Such are the causes, traced in the incessant agitation of
penal transportation.

Two incompatible objects have been always professedly
embraced--intimidation and reform; but while they have both animated the
scheme, they have struggled for the ascendancy, and the one or the other
has seemed to be the chief, if not sole, motive of government. The
Australian seal expressed the design of mercy: it was to oxen
ploughing--to bales of merchandise, and the various attributes of
industry, that Hope pointed the landing convict, when she broke off his
bonds. Fifty years after, Lord Stanley deemed many years spent in
chains, a just punishment for crimes against property, or others of no
deep dye.

The changes of systems have been usually based on facts and opinions,
elicited during those paroxysms of reform which occur generally once in
ten years. Thus the improvement of discipline; the efficiency of convict
labor; the several efforts to restrain its attendant vices; have
usually occurred when some old officer has been superseded; and others
have devoted to their novel duties the first vigour of their zeal.

The whole spirit and apparent object of convict discipline has been
revolutionised several times. In the vicissitudes of English factions a
new secretary of state has had power to sift and overturn the expedients
of a rival. It has rarely remained beyond a few months in one stay. For
four or six years, during the governorship of Colonel Arthur,
transportation reached its highest perfection. It was rendered uniform,
by the imperial confidence reposed in his judgment; more so by the
demand for labor, by the rapid influx of capital, and by the common
interest of the government, the colonist, and the well-doing prisoner.
It would be difficult to find half that period undisturbed under any
other ruler.

Many difficulties connected with transportation are created by natural
and social laws: full of mercy to the human race. The sufferings
inflicted by man cannot reform man: he cannot carry out the vengeance of
another, for wrongs he neither endured nor saw. His heart melts at the
sight of distress, and forgetting general principles, says, in the
absence of accusers, "neither do I condemn thee;" or if forgetful of a
common nature, he punishes with inflexible severity, while the iron
enters the soul of his brother his own heart is seared. Thus, again, a
na