NEW SOUTH WALES AND PARLIAMENT. 305 



whom to entrust these difficult and important investigations. 

 Finally it was decided to send one Commissioner only, and 

 Mr. J. T. Bigge accepted the post with a salary of .3,000 a 

 year. He had held judicial offices in Trinidad, and was a high- 

 minded, conscientious, intelligent man, well fitted for his post 

 With him as Secretary with a reversion to the Commissioner- 

 ship went Mr. Thomas Hobbes Scott, but whether or no he 

 played any important part in preparing the reports it is quite 

 impossible to say. 



Bigge's commission was dated 6th January, 1819, but he 

 did not sail until April, and his appointment was spoken of in 

 the House of Commons as about to be made as late as March, 

 1819. 



The year was an important one for the Colony. Bennet 

 published his letter to Lord Sidmouth, in which he described 

 the settlement as he knew it from the reports of Marsden, Vale 

 and J. H. Bent, and W. C. Wentworth, the eldest son of 

 D'Arcy Wentworth, published the first edition of his descrip- 

 tion of New South Wales, which contained some information 

 of the agricultural condition of the Colony and an enthusiastic 

 account of its capabilities, and put very strongly in Wentworth's 

 rather perfervid style the need for jury trial and a legislative 

 council. 1 It took the place of a history of New South Wales 

 up to 1812 written by a Mr. O'Hara, who had, however, no first- 

 hand knowledge of the Colony. 2 Still the interest in New 

 South Wales was keen, for the book published in 1812 went 

 into a second edition in 1818. The three books were criticised 

 in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1819, by Sydney Smith with 

 his usual colonial pessimism, and he accepted much more 

 readily the denunciations of Bennet than the hopeful patriot- 

 ism of W. C. Wentworth. 



" Thus much," he concluded, " for Botany Bay. As a mere 

 Colony it is too distant and too expensive ; and, in future, will 

 involve us of course in many of those just and necessary wars 

 which deprive Englishmen so rapidly of their comforts, and 



1 This book went through a second edition, and in a much enlarged form into 

 a third edition in 1824. This last contained a long account of Macquane's 

 government and a violent attack on Marsden. 



* History of New South Wales. 



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