ng impression of the manly character and practical ability of
their writer. If his abstract reasonings are sometimes perverse, we are
convinced that his practical good sense is such, that in the management
of any enterprise, he would in reality so order his proceedings, that,
whatever his pen might do, his conduct would contradict no sound
principle of expediency. If it were the object to reclaim a set of
felons or vagabonds, and fit them--say for the naval and military
service--we are persuaded that the task could not be confided to better
hands than those of the gallant Captain. During his residence at Norfolk
island, he seems to have obtained the esteem of even the worst of the
sad crew he had to discipline; and this, it is evident, without
sacrificing a jot of the duties of his station. He is plainly not the
man to make any boast of such a matter, or to feel too highly flattered
by it. "Instances of individual attachment to myself," he says, at the
conclusion of his pamphlet _On the Management of Transported Convicts_,
"I could multiply without number; but these, for obvious reasons, I
forbear to quote; and in truth they as often pained me as pleased me, by
being too deferential. It is a great and very common mistake, in
managing prisoners, to be too much gratified by mere obedience and
servility: duplicity is much encouraged by this; and, of two opposite
errors, it is better rather to overlook a little occasional
insubordination. I cannot refuse, however, to cite two traits, whose
character cannot be mistaken. I had a large garden within a few hundred
yards of the ticket-of-leave village at Cascade, where from 300 to 400
men lived, four to six in a hut, never locked up, nor under other guard
through the night than that of a police sentry, one of their own number.
The garden was by the road-side, very imperfectly fenced with open
paling, and fully stocked with choice fruit and vegetables, bananas,
pine-apples, grapes, melons, and others, which _to men on a salt ration_
must have offered a great temptation; these were constantly under view,
yet I scarcely ever lost any. And by a letter, received a few weeks ago,
I learn that five men, having picked up an old black silk handkerchief
that had belonged to me, have had their prayer books bound with it." [1]

The Captain's theoretical error is, that he too much confounds the
necessity of penal laws with the duty of public education. The duty of
the state to educate its sub