d out domino." Of fifty, one half had never been flogged before.
Then there follows in each case a description of the writhings of the
sufferers: the discoloration of the skin, the time at which the blood
appeared, and whatever might illustrate the power of the lash to degrade
and torture. These returns were obtained to vindicate Governor Bourke
from the charge of unseasonable lenity, and to prove that no just
discontent was authorised by the mitigations he had enforced.

A great portion of these punishments were inflicted by the order of Mr.
Slade. Dismissed for immoralities he was authorised to avenge, he
excused them by alleging his youth. Though capricious, he was not cruel;
but it is due to mankind, to protest against depositing power in the
hands of young persons, who have to cover their own passions by the plea
of juvenility, and who, in every part of the penal colonies, have
exhibited an example of those habits which lead to crime--and too often
administered public vengeance in the spirit of tyranny.

Corporal punishment, long tenaciously vindicated, by those who ruled
masses of men, was held indispensible, and no severe reproach can be due
to the government which authorised, or the magistrates who ordered, its
infliction. It seems, indeed, to be essential to every social system
that denies the ordinary rewards of labor. The rebel slave, to deprive
his master, will dare any suffering which suspends or terminates his
service. But beside those who employed the lash from conviction, there
were others of a different stamp: it is quietly observed by Messrs.
Backhouse and Walker, that they found its greatest advocates "among
persons given to profane swearing." The violent temper, prone to break
out in imprecations, would find another and congenial relief in scenes
of torture and debasement. There were modes of punishment which no
prejudice could extenuate: among these, the infliction of the lash in a
form which degraded society more than it debased the sufferer. Thus, at
Hobart Town, men, for mere faults, have been sentenced to _exposure_ and
the scourge, in the view of hundreds: the flagellator extinguished the
last feeling of the man, and roused the temper of the demon. An old
compositor, within a month of his freedom, was charged with some
trifling breach of convict discipline, and though the father of grown up
children, was ordered by a chief police magistrate, this cruel disgrace.
He is dead--and his oppressor is