erty
been seized, destroyed, and confiscated, but many persons had been
imprisoned, and suffered all the miseries of felon bonds: yet when
arrears, which the indulgence of the government had permitted to
accumulate, were made a subject of legal procedure, the whole fabric of
taxation and legislation by the governor's will, fell down.[93]

The judge of the supreme court could not be insensible to the serious
personal responsibility of longer supporting illegal taxation: he
privately admonished the governor, who withdrew his actions. An act of
indemnity released the ministers who advised, and the governors who
enforced their demands, from the punishment of usurpation; and granted
them power to do by law, what in defiance of law they had done so
long.[94]

Ingenious aggravations were made to the common penalties of a crime:
Collins relates that a witness convicted of perjury, was condemned to
the pillory: his ears nailed to the post as an additional
punishment.[95]

The courts of those times confounded everything together, and deciding
the perjury of a witness, often tried two parties at the same moment.
Flogging witnesses was an ordinary result of investigations, when they
did not end in convictions: so late as 1823, Judge Wylde ordered a
witness to be taken outside, and receive _instanter_ one hundred
lashes.[96]

The long privation of this colony of judicial protection, not only
hindered the due administration of justice, but encouraged imprudence
and fraud. In the year 1814, when the crown erected a supreme court at
Sydney for the decision of civil causes, Major Abbot, a member of the
New South Wales corps, was commissioned as deputy judge advocate in Van
Diemen's Land. He adjudicated in petty session as a magistrate, and by
the accommodation of law to the circumstances of the colony, dealt in a
summary manner with capital offences where prisoners were concerned.
Thus sheep stealing and crimes against the person, committed by
prisoners, were punished by flogging, and removal to a more penal
station; and thus, while a prisoner of the crown might escape with a
milder sentence, free persons for similar offences were placed in
jeopardy of their lives.

"The experiment of a reformatory penal colony," said Sir James
Mackintosh, "is the grandest ever tried; but New South Wales is governed
on principles of political economy more barbarous than those which
prevailed under Queen Bess."[97] This great statesman, who declar