302 



A COLONIAL AUTOCRACY. 



and was not returned in the new Parliament in 1 82 1. Strictly he 

 belonged rather to the Radical left than to the regular Whig 

 opposition, and he took a prominent position on questions of 

 prison reform and criminal law. Miss Martineau refers to him 

 in conjunction with Sir Francis Burdett as a popularity hunter, 

 and one of those who made "frenzied declamations against in- 

 dividual members of the Government ". l This, indeed, appears 

 to have been his favourite form of debate, and not particularly 

 liked by some who supported him. " Bennet very coarse but 

 very strong," Wilberforce records in his diary on one occasion. 2 

 He used to be coached in his Parliamentary business by Francis 

 Place. "I told Bennet," he wrote in 1819, "from the first that 

 \ should wear him out, that he would be obliged either to shun 

 me or lead a dog's life with his party. He said, ' No,' I said 

 ' Yes '. He has done so. But next session he will come again, 

 and as he certainly means well, I shall be pleased to see him." 3 

 In these slight criticisms, and in the light of his writing 

 and speeches, Bennet appears as a rather blusterous Radical 

 of no remarkable ability, but active, clever, and ready to take 

 up the cause of those he thought oppressed. The official Whigs, 

 as Place observed, disliked him ; and he rather shocked the 

 gentle Wilberforce. He was, however, very active in the 

 cause of New South Wales, and in these years not without in- 

 fluence in its affairs. When in 1816 the Transportation Act 

 was about once more to expire, Bennet urged that the Bill to 

 renew it brought in by the Government should not be rushed 

 through the House, as had been done in the previous year. He 

 expressed himself as opposed altogether to the principle of 

 transportation, and proceeded to the inaccurate and startling 

 statement, made probably on hearsay evidence only, that the 

 whole system of management at Botany Bay tended so little to 

 reform the convicts that "the numbers of executions in that 

 settlement far exceeded the average of natural deaths '. 4 In 

 the second reading Bennet spoke again to much the same effect, 



1 Martineau's History of the Peace, vol. i., p. 149, referring to debate on Habeas 

 Corpus Suspension, 23rd June, 1818. 



8 Life of Wilberforce, February, 1818, vol. iv., p. 369. 



3 Life of Francis Place, Graham Wallas, p. 178. Place to Hobhouse, i6th 

 August, 1819. 



4 Hansard, vol. xxxiii., p. 595, i6th March, 1816. 



