ght suspect to be
highway robbers or burglars; or any individual in the colony, without
any warrant or authority, may take another into custody, on the mere
suspicion that he is a convict illegally at large: if it appear to the
magistrate that he had a just or probable cause for suspicion, he is
justified in doing so. The onus of proving that he is not a convict
illegally at large, is thrown upon the suspected person, and if that is
not established to the satisfaction of the magistrate, he is liable to
be retained in custody, or sent to Sydney to be examined and dealt
with.'

"The number of executions in New South Wales in the year 1830 exceeded
the whole number of executions in England and Wales, in the same year;
which, taking the proportion of the populations of the countries, makes
capital punishments upwards of three hundred and twenty-five times as
frequent as in the mother country. This horrid fact is pretty well, of
itself, an answer to all argument drawn from the idea of Reformation.
But direct testimony is abundant. Major McArthur, the son of one of the
wealthiest and most extensive settlers in the colony, and to whom it
owes so much for its present progress in production and commerce,
states, 'It is painful to know that those whose sentences have expired,
or to whom pardons have been granted, seldom or ever incline to reform,
even when they have acquired property. Intoxication and fraud are
habitual to them; and hardly six persons can be named throughout the
colony, who, being educated men, and having been transported for
felonies, have afterwards become sober, moral, and industrious members
of the community. Crime is of constant occurrence, and so completely
organized, that cattle are carried off from the settlers in large
numbers, and slaughtered for the traders in Sydney, who contract with
the commissariat. It is not, therefore, the vicious habits alone of the
town which are to be dreaded, but the effects that are communicated and
felt throughout the country. The agricultural labourer is encouraged to
plunder his master, by finding a ready sale for the property he steals,
and whenever his occupations call him to the towns, he sees and yields
himself to the vicious habits around him. He returns intoxicated and
unsettled to his employer's farm, and incites his comrades to the same
sensual indulgences, with equal disregard of the risk and the
consequences. To these causes the present vitiated and disorganized