ening,
whatever the sacredness of the oath they have recently taken. If
practical experience is of any real value, then it may safely be
pronounced that men, who are scarcely fit to enjoy the privilege of
sitting upon juries, are certainly at present unprepared for the
introduction of a representative form of legislation and government.
The civil juries of New South Wales have held the scales of justice
uncommonly even, for they have managed to acquit about 50 per cent. of
the persons tried; whereas in Great Britain, and even in Ireland, the
acquittals are 19 per cent., and the convictions 81 per cent. A strange,
but not unaccountable difference, which, so long as it may continue,
will furnish a strong argument of the unfitness of the colony for a
representative assembly. Men that have not the principle to put good
laws into execution, are very ill qualified to make good laws, or to
elect good legislators. And when, to suit party purposes, a clamour is
raised about the injustice of denying fresh "constitutional rights"
to our fellow-subjects in Australia, we may quietly dispose of this
(hitherto absurd and mischievous) claim by referring the very parties
raising it to the accounts published, under the sanction chiefly of men
of their own opinions, respecting the use made of those rights with
which the inhabitants of the penal colonies are already invested. When
the evils of the system of transportation are to be exposed, the truth
may be told respecting the state of the Australian juries;[202] but
why should it not be still declared,--why should not truth _always_ be
told,--even at the hazard of checking "liberal principles," and delaying
representative houses of assembly for the Australian colonies, until the
time when they may know how to use them, so that these may prove a
benefit instead of an evil to them?

[199] Evidence of J. MacArthur, Esq., before the Committee on
Transportation, in 1837, No. 3371-2, p. 220. The richest man in the
colony, an emancipist, was said, in 1837, to be worth 40,000_l._ or
45,000_l._ a year. For an account of the shameless roguery, and drunken
folly, by means of which so vast an income was amassed, see Report of
Transp. Com. 1837, p. 14 and 104.

[200] Barrington's History of New South Wales, p. 421.

[201] For the mode in which the law admitting emancipists into the
jurors' box was passed, see Lang's New South Wales, vol. i. p. 317-320.
"Two absent members of the