Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/525

son was necessarily familiar, with members of the class whom Macquarie delighted to honour. They scorned to be excluded from any position. They demanded trial by jury, and inveighed against the power of the Governor to deport a British subject. W. C. Wentworth^[1] in 1819 denounced with almost savage fury, but classic force, the things which seemed evil in the sight of the first of Australian patriots, then about twenty-five years old. Crude his book might be, but it was a new power, and would have commanded attention, even if it had not been published while the appointment of Mr. Bigge was under consideration. The book was not all of one vein; amidst fulminations against the tyranny of Bligh, praise of Macquarie, and longings for free institutions in Australia, he thus apostrophized the mother country:

"Generous Britain, not more renowned in arts and arms than in mercy and benevolence, may thy supremacy be coeval with thy humanity! Or if that be impossible; if thou be doomed to undergo that declension and decay from which no human institutions, no works of man, appear to be exempt, may the records of thy philanthropy hold the world in subject awe and admiration long after the dominion of thy power shall have passed away! May they soften the hearts of future nations, and be a shining sun that shall illuminate both hemispheres, and chase from every region of the earth the black reign of barbarism and cruelty for ever!"

The various remedies which he proposed for existing evils embraced the constitution, the administration of justice, and the fiscal condition of the colony. They were not adopted. The representations of Mr. Bigge were to prevail.

The grievance of the half-pardoned convicts was specially redressed. Mr. Bigge reported that they had just reason to ask relief. The judgment of the King's Bench in 1819—which declared that by attainder all personal property and rights of action in respect of property accruing to the person attainted either before or after attainder were vested in the Crown, and that attainder might be well pleaded in bar to an action on a bill of exchange endorsed to the plaintiff after his attainder—was put forward by Bigge as proving the necessity of some change in New South Wales, where so large a proportion of the community consisted of persons who had been attainted. The English Government dealt with