To render corruption more difficult, the power of the governors was limited by statute. They had granted tickets-of-leave for the discovery of outlaws, the detection of serious crimes, and any service of great public utility. They had been often swayed by feelings of humanity in hastening the liberation of men, whose families required their care; but an Act "for abolishing the punishment of death in certain cases,"[200] not only fixed the time when prisoners should be capable of tickets-of-leave, but abstracted the chief advantages a ticket conferred. They were excluded from the protection of civil laws, and thus thrown on the mercy of any who might employ them. These clauses were introduced by Lord Wynford (Sergeant Best), and were intended to equalise the punishment of offenders, and to prevent an early enjoyment of plunder. This restriction was, however, practically unjust. The grant of a ticket-of-leave was to enable a man to procure a livelihood: to deprive him of legal resource, was to invite the swindler and the cheat to make his earnings and acquisitions their prey. The local courts had hitherto resisted the injustice by evasion: a record of conviction being required to stay a civil action; although in the criminal courts it was sufficient to prove that the person accused had been dealt with as a transported offender.
Lord Wynford's Act made no such distinction. Its provision, probably the result of inadvertence, was so palpably a contradiction, that it was never acted upon in Van Diemen's Land, and was earnestly deprecated by all classes. To grant a prisoner liberty to seek subsistence, and yet suffer any fraudulent person to deprive him of his just wages, could arise only from that confusion of ideas, too common in legislation on the subject.
[Footnote 187: "It can scarcely be doubted, that the main body of convicts are under mental delirium--they see and appreciate every thing through a false medium; and as, from long experience and close observation, the Lieutenant-Governor is confident that a firm and determined, but mild and consistent supervision, is the very best to be followed, in order to remove the infirmity under which they labor, it is the treatment he enjoins shall be uniformly observed!"--_Regulations issued to the Roads' Department._]
