more often the frozen
hardness of the ice, which the sun of human sympathies may melt again.
The world, accustomed to judge them harshly, to see only their crime,
and to see it without its palliations--to out-cast them, makes them what
they become; when instead, a discreet humanity might have converted
many, after a first transgression, into useful and honored members of
society.

'The tainted branches of the tree,
If lopp'd with care, a strength may give,
By which the rest shall bloom and live
All greenly fresh and wildly free:
But if the _lightning_ in its wrath
The waving boughs with fury scathe,
The massy trunk the ruin feels,
And never more a leaf reveals.'"

--_Secondary Punishments. By Frederick Maitland Innes._ 1841.]

[Footnote 246: November, 1842.]

SECTION XXIII.

When the new secretary of state saw that the probation gangs, formed
under Lord John Russell's directions, were not attended with moral
benefit, he attributed the failure to the defective supply of religious
teaching, and not to the inherent qualities of the scheme. It became
necessary to reorganise the whole plan, and to provide for the
transportation of 4,000 men annually. Lord Stanley was greatly
perplexed; but Captain Montagu (dismissed by Sir John Franklin) and the
attorney-general of New South Wales happened to reach Downing-street at
the moment: in concert with them, Lord Stanley framed the celebrated
"System of Probation," which has astonished the whole civilised world.

The employment of men in gangs, had been practised from the foundation
of these colonies: they usually, however, consisted of persons under
short colonial sentences, and who were only sequestered awhile from
society. The distribution of ten or twelve thousand men over a settled
country, in parties of from two to three hundred, and subject to an
oversight not usually exceeding the ordinary superintendence of free
labor, was indeed an experiment, and fraught with the most important
consequences.

At the head of this scheme was a comptroller-general, appointed by royal
warrant, who, as colonial secretary for the convict department, was in
communication with the governor alone. Under him were superintendents
and overseers, religious instructors, and all other subordinate
officers. He was authorised to make rules for the government of the
whole, and these were minute and elaborate; and gave to the department
the air of a great m