294 A COLONIAL AUTOCRACY. 



autocracy at Sydney, were driven into the arms of the Whigs 

 and the Radicals in England. 1 



It was without their solicitation and apparently without their 

 knowledge that Jeremy Bentham took up the subject of New 

 South Wales in 1802. In this year he wrote his two letters to 

 Lord Pelham. The first compared the system of dealing with 

 criminals by transportation to New South Wales with his own 

 scheme of the Panopticon, the second described the home peni- 

 tentiaries of America. His attention was thus called to the con- 

 dition of New South Wales by the neglect of his Panopticon, 

 and in 1 803 he pursued the subject in a pamphlet entitled " A 

 Plea for the Constitution," in which he discussed not the " policy 

 of the settlement," but its "legality". 2 



The only material before Bentham in writing of New South 

 Wales was that provided by a few remarks by the Select Com- 

 mittee on Finance in 1798, and the History of New Holland 'by 

 Lieutenant-Governor Collins, of which a second edition was 

 published in 1 802 and which gave in diary form a naive account 

 of colonial life. 3 



Little noticed as these writings of Bentham' s were, it seems 

 worth while to give some account of his treatment of the 

 Colony's affairs for two reasons, first because each point to 

 which he turned his attention came to be discussed afterwards, 

 and because the two men who chiefly bestirred themselves in 

 New South Wales affairs between 1810 and 1820, Sir Samuel 

 Romilly and the Hon. H. Grey Bennet, both came within the 

 influence of Bentham. 4 



In the first letter to Lord Pelham, 5 Bentham sought to dis- 



1 The Canadians took much the same course. See letter above, Lord 

 Liverpool to Sir J. Craig. " You may rely upon it, that if the subject of the con- 

 stitution of Canada was brought under the discussion of Parliament, the cause of 

 the Canadians would be warmly supported by all the democrats and friends of re- 

 form in the country." 



a The letters to Lord Pelham were published in 1802. The Plea for the 

 Constitution in 1803. See Romilly's Memoirs, 1791, vol. i., p. 417, published in 

 1840. The copy of the Plea in the British Museum belonged to Sir S. Romilly 

 (a gift from the author). 



3 This volume, with a very inferior production by Mason in 1811, remained 

 the only sources of information in regard to New South Wales available in 

 England up till 1812. See Romilly's Speech in House of Commons, i2th 

 February, 1812. Hansard, vol. xxii.. p. 762. 



4 Romilly of course directly, and Bennet through Francis Place. See later, 

 p. 302. 



8 P. 68. Letter to Lord Pelham. 



