Another powerful voice was raised by Judge Burton, whose charge to the grand jury of Sydney in November, 1835, attracted universal attention. Not alone were crimes constantly detected and punished, but others, often the most flagrant, stalked undiscovered through the land. And numerous executions exercised no effect in deterring from crime. The example of repeated capital punishments caused no alarm. There was no attempt by the masters to raise the moral tone of their convicts; no religious worship on Sundays, as we have seen; and instead of it, drunkenness and debauchery. Masters, indeed, exercised hardly any control over their men. To this Judge Burton traced nearly all the crime. Many of the most daring robberies were to be attributed to this, and this alone. Convict servants, as many as five and six together, went about openly to plunder, masked, and armed with muskets--a weapon not capable of much concealment. Even in broad daylight, and in the open highway, harmless folk had been stopped by these miscreants and robbed. In a word, Judge Burton intimated clearly that transportation must cease. The colonies could never rise to their proper position; they could not obtain those free institutions for which even then they were agitating; in a word, the whole moral aspect of the colony suffered so terribly by the present system, that the time must come when it must be abandoned altogether. The reader who has followed me through this and the preceding chapter will probably admit that the method of transportation, as it had been administered, was indeed a failure. Looking at the actual tangible results, as they appeared at that date, at an early period of the colonial history, and before years of subsequent prosperity and cleanly life had purged the colony of its one constant infectious bane, they were most unsatisfactory. Hardly any one could be said to have profited in all these years but the convicts for whom transportation had been instituted. But it had been instituted as a punishment, not as a boon; and although we cannot actually quarrel with a system which had the undoubted effect of turning large numbers of criminals into wealthy and therefore, to a certain extent, honest men, we may fairly condemn it on principle. Transportation to the antipodes was about the kindest thing we could do for the criminal class. It was, indeed, removing them to a distance from their old haunts and ways of life, but they went to a land flowing with milk and honey. After the earlier years the vague terrors of that unknown country had disappeared. Hardly a family of thieves but had one or more relatives at the other end of "the pond." Those without relatives had numerous friends and pals who had gone before. Besides which there was this distinct anomaly, that convicts were now sent for their crimes to a land which was held out as a land of promise to the free emigrant. "It not unfrequently happens, that whilst a judge is