Please wait. Contacting image service... loading
Hide article pages Show article pages
  1. Page 575
    Page 575 thumbnail
  2. Page 576
    Page 576 thumbnail

Article text

On this Page 575
VAN DIEMEN'S LAND.
——oo——
DISTRESSING MEASURES OF THE HOME
GOVERNMENT WITH REGARD
TO THESE COLONIES
(From the " Hobart Town Courier.")
The amount of money directed to be taken from
the colonial chest at Sydney instead of from the.
Commissariat, as formerly, is stated at 25,000l. a-
year. On what proportional data His Majesty's
Right Hon. Secretary of State, or the Lords Com-
missioners of the Treasury, have considered that
the people of Van Diemen's Land should in like
manner be taxed to the amount of 19,000l., does
not yet appear. But we beg most respectfully to
state, for the information of these high officers of
our King, that if the sum were only so many
pence, it must be attended with ruin to this com-
paratively infant colony. The concerns of New
South Wales are best known to its own inhabit-
ants. The resources of its extensive territory have
now for some time been brought to a profitable
and productive state. The fostering expenditure
(we do not say it was a penny too large) of
hundreds of thousands of pounds, which it enjoyed
for more than thirty years before this colony could
be said to be fairly founded, have placed it perhaps
beyond the reach of the calamities that will ine-
vitably overtake us by a similar visitation, while
an advantage from a difference of 5 per cent. of
exchange between the two colonies is daily enrich-
ing the elder to the proportionate impoverishment
of the younger. It was but the other day that a
person (we do not call him a settler, as he culti-
vated neither acres nor trade, but the interest and
returns of money only) carried up 4,000l. of
money, gathered from our banks, with which he
will probably purchase bills on the Lords of the
Treasury, and return to Hobart Town to dispose
of them at a profit of 5 or 6 per cent. All this
may be done (and is done) in less than 5 or 6
weeks, so that a stock-of-money-jobber of this
description may realise with the greatest possible
safety an annual return for his money of 50 or 60
per cent. In case, however, our friends of the
London Stock Exchange should be caught with
this tempting bait, we beg to inform them that
long before this can reach them, the profitable
traffic will be at an end-there is no more British
money afloat in the country to work upon—the
milch cow is dry—the golden egg is smashed.
But if these colonies could afford this impost
ever so well, with what semblance of justness, we
would ask, can they be called upon to contribute
in any shape to the expenses consequent on the
prevalence of crime in England ? It is perfectly
true, and we are proud to avow it, that we have
succeeded in reducing a large proportion of the
British offenders transported to our shores to
honest and industrious habits, and that many of
them are thus become profitable and useful servant's
to us in the improvement of the colony. But this
advantage has been obtained at an inconceivable
expense of toil, anxiety, vexation, and trouble
an expense of which the home authorities have
evidently not the most remote conception, and we
are, in addition, to be taxed for performing this
good work ? Why, we have no right to be called
upon to pay such expenses than we have to fly in
the air ! As well might the Lords of the Treasury
call upon the missionaries at Tongataboo or else-
where—" Reverend gentlemen," they might direct
their secretary to say, " you have been remarkably
successful in converting a large portion of the
people among whom you dwell from the darkness
of heathenism to a happy sense of Christian and
social duties Instead of angry contentions and
warlike outrages, you have taught them to be in-
dustrious, to cultivate the soil, and earn and taste
the fruits of civilisation. Under these circum-
stances, it appears to my Lords, that the time has
now arrived when you may safely, be called upon
to contribute to the expenses incurred in maintain-
ing, confining, and bringing the offenders in
England to justice—offenders whom it has been
found expedient to encourage in their wickedness
and propagation of crime, by a direct sanction and
invitation in every possible way of that grand
engine in producing it—the manufacture and use
of strong drink. Without this, we confess, the
main tap-root of the growth of crime would soon
decay—nine-tenths of the wheels of our crime
promoting engine would be arrested—and what is
more, a very large portion of the annual revenue
of the kingdom, now derived in duties on the sale
of spirits, would cease My Lords have no recent
statement of the exact number of bread fruit trees
which have been planted through your beneficial
influence in Tongataboo, and in the meantime
they think it advisable that you should limit your
remittances to feed our English offenders to the
produce of not more than 12,000l. It has not
formed, of course, any part of their Lordships' con-
sideration, whether this number of bread trees can
easily be spread without entailing starvation on the
population of your islands—reports have reached
them that your soil is remarkably productive—

and if not, people in your remote and savage parts
of the globe have many resources—they are known
in time of scarcity and upon emergencies, to eat
one another ? In conclusion, their Lordships have
commanded me to convey to you their approba-
tion of the zeal and great success which have at-
tended your missionary labors "

But how preposterous it is to talk of promoting
emigration to colonies, the advancement of which
is in the same breath so effectually denounced !
You tell the intending emigrants in England—'go
out and settle in Van Diemen's Land, it is a fine
and prosperous colony—you have read the police
reports and the Old Bailey trials in the news-
papers yesterday—see what a glorious lot of
pickpockets and thieves of all sorts ! they are all
going along with you—your company will be of
the choicest kind, and we will confer upon you the
additional favor of keeping and feeding them, and
those you cannot get to work and keep quiet you
shall be allowed, we mean compelled, to build
gaols, &c., for their further security. We cannot
afford you a single acre of the unlocated territory
you are going to, but after searching about the
country for a little bit, you may get it put to sale
in the course of may be six months, when some
one will bid against you, and raise your favorite
chosen spot to the enviable price of perhaps a
guinea an acre. Your who complain of taxes here
in England cannot object to keep convicts in Van
Diemen's Land.' These considerations are appal-
ling as they are contradictory But we entreat
our readers not to be alarmed or dismayed at the
melancholy prospect. When the matter is fairly
represented to His Majesty's Government, be it
Tory or Whig, Reformer or Radical, it must yet
of necessity be composed of Englishmen, and en-
dued with English feelings ; and we look with
confidence to the humanity and intelligence that
will actuate them not to persist in a measure so
destructive and so wholly ruinous.

The subject is of the most vital moment to us
all in Van Diemen's Land, and we shall recur to
it in future numbers with renewed application and

energy.

$