Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/557

masters from profiting by labourers whom they neither supported nor controlled. He maintained that Ring; was never at large, and he extracted from Lawson, one of the magistrates who fined him, that Lawson himself had more than once paid convicts for services sanctioned by their masters, who allowed them to work for him. The result of the inquiry was favourable to Marsden, but a letter (Jan. 1825) from Barron Field proves that Marsden's friends were anxious. Telling Marsden that Archdeacon Scott would be impartial and just, that Forbes was another assessor,—"and therefore I consider you will prove your charges;" he added,

"But leave no stone unturned, for Dr. Douglass has not spared you latterly in England, and if he don't fall, you will. You may wrap yourself up in conscious integrity, and at your time of life, and with your religious consolations, you may be indifferent to temporal opinion; but you owe something to those who have pledged themselves in your cause. If you are defeated, your friends will full with you. Mr. Wilberforce will be mortified. The Church Missionary Society will be scandalized. You are therefore bound to exert yourself on the behalf of those who are implicated with you, and who are (as it were) sureties for your good behaviour. Think of these things and get up your proofs well, and not in that slovenly manner that Mr. Scott Bays you did before Mr. Bigge, Never was there suck powerful interest made for anybody as for Dr. Douglass, Sir Thomas's letter was all in his own handwriting. Major Goulburn urged his brother as it were for a life and death matter. Mr. Stephen could not have advocated Dr. Douglass's cause better (in ray presence) before Mr. Horton if he had had a brief of fifty guineas. . . . Mr. Wilberforce is wholly yours, but I am amazed at his nephew's enmity to you. I combated this before Mr. Horton so successfully that the Under-Secretary took your part, and Mr. Stephen was forced to apologize for his partiality. . . . Your letter to Mr. Peel worked as you intended, and set the one department upon the other; and Lord Bathurst could only quiet Mr. Peel by promising further inquiry."

That Sir T. Brisbane should write earnestly to Lord Bathurst, and that Major Goulburn (Brisbane's Secretary) should with equal fervour importune Mr, Goulburn, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, was a combination sufficient to alarm Marsden's friends. They on their part awakened the interest not only of Wilberforce but of the just and generous Peel. Lord Bathurst was constrained to express publicly the sense entertained by the government of Marsden's "long, laborious, and praiseworthy exertions in behalf of religion and morality." He directed Brisbane to increase the stipend, in consequence of "the long and useful services of the old chaplain, whom the appointment of