Note 9 July 1802 + 12 13 N. S Wales

N o

5 (p.159.) April 1791. Information given by the Governor

to the Convicts "that never would be permitted to quit the Colony who

had "wives and children incapable of maintaining themselves and

"likely to become burthensome to the settlement, untill

they had "found sufficient security for the maintenance of such

wives

or children. "as long as they might

continue after them."

What would be deemed sufficient security is not stated.

It could only be

in here and there an instance that a watch thus circumstanced

could be able to find any security at all.

The occasion of this ordinance is curious enough:

Notions were currant

among the Convicts that the marriages of each of them as had been married

in the Colony were not binding.

Such is the reason given for

confining to the Colony all men whatever who had

either wives or children there, whether

the marriage had been celebrated since their arrival in the

Colony or before. ]

+1

+1 In the case of a wife married in South

Wales and where term of punishment was unexpired, finding such

security was impossible. By marrying a woman so circumstanced, a man could

result to lose her bondage, nor

forfeit his own

freedom.

to everyone married in law

Justice — or at least a semblance of it is so interwoven in this

case with injustice, that it is no easy matter to disentangle them. As an

abstract proposition, it is but reasonable, that a man should be prevented

from leaving his wife or children from being burthensome to

other people. Such accordingly is the law in England. When in this

country

England a man deserts his family, he flied from home. But in the case in question, the flight, if not

obstructed, would have been a flight

homewards, and from a place in which no authority

there could detain a man without a crime. That the inocent wife

or inocent children having, under a mistaken confidence in the

justice and humanity of government, suffered themselves to be transported

to this unhuman

region, should, by the

improvidence, and injustice and inhumanity and

improvidence of men in , see themselves confined then

perhaps for life, is indeed a melancholy state of things: but it will be

difficult to say that the injustice, done to any number

of individuals thus circumstanced would be redressed, by adding to it

another of the same kind. — +2

+2 The solution of the difficulty is not

difficult: to those who sent those innocents thither, belongs in

justice the care and the expence of sending them back

again.

The more

doubtfull, the course most proper to

be taken on this occasion, the clearer the abominathness

of the system and the improvidence and incapacity of those by whom it

was contrived: +3

+3 contrived without any known ,

and afterwards itself magnified, in the

bulk of convictions,

into a pretense a pretense for relinquishing a system

, without spot clear of those

and

this as well as all other abominations.