to employ them in doing good service to the public, combined with the hope of emancipation, held out as the reward of good behaviour. Practical benevolence, even under the guise of a new and untried system, is entitled to our heartfelt respect; and with such a feeling we must regard the labours of Capt. Maconachie on the unpromising field of Norfolk Island. This little paradise has been converted into a penitentiary for transported convicts, who, under the exploded system, would have been distributed as labourers among the Australian settlers, or employed by government on public works. Capt. Maconachie’s system is founded on a charitable view of the unfavourable or pressing circumstances from which he supposes the majority of crimes to originate. He regards the criminal as labour ing under a malady of the heart and mind, induced by the ignorance, misery, and evil example, for which, as their only inheritance, so many human beings are ushered into existence, and therefore demanding for its cure a course of moral treatment of an appropriate nature, the end in view being to reform the character by cultivating the higher faculties. Capt. Maconachie’s reports give a favourable view of the practical efficacy of his system, in as far as it has been tried. But until a more extended experience can be appealed to, it would be premature to give this, or any other form of the penitentiary system, a preference over that of employing criminals in useful public works in the colonies, with the promise of emanci pation, as an inducement to good conduct. Much importance has been attached to a very deceptive statistical table, extracted from the work of Col. Forsell, a Danish author, in which the number of crimes, with g 3
