About this time Dr. Lang established the _Observer_. Its object was to write down the emancipist partisans, and the journals subject to their power. The good service performed by this earnest censor was not without alloy: and in his attacks on their moral reputation, he seemed sometimes to write what they themselves might have written. The emancipists were drawn together by common sympathies: they charged the free settlers with attempting to exact from the sufferings and failings of their brethren, a consideration in the colony, to which they were entitled neither by their rank nor their reputation. Nor was this reflection always without reason: in strange forgetfulness of the natural operation of self-love, the upper classes of New South Wales expected multitudes, often of greater wealth than themselves, to walk humbly in their presence. Such claims the emancipists met with defiance. The false morality of their journals will be largely ascribed by a calm enquirer to retaliation and hatred, rather than to a judgment corrupted--in reference to the real nature of crime.[220] Nothing so powerfully contributed to rouse the attention of the empire, as the charge of Judge Burton, delivered to the petty jurors, at the close of the criminal court, 1835. Perhaps a more awful picture was never drawn, or a more serious impeachment pronounced against a people. This celebrated speech furnished the text of examination, when parliament once more enquired on the subject. Judge Burton asserted that the whole community seemed engaged in the commission or the punishment of crimes. Crimes, including 442 capital convictions in three years: crimes of violence, murders, manslaughters in drunken revels--deliberate perjuries, from motives of revenge or reward, were brought to light. He complained of the deficiency of religious principle: of the neglect and profanation of the sabbath: on which day the worst actions were planned and perpetrated. The convict stations he compared to "bee-hives, diligently pouring in and out; but with this difference--the one worked by day, the other by night: the one goes forth to industry, the other to plunder." These evils he traced to "squatting;" the congregation of prisoner servants in Sydney; the license of improper persons to public houses; and, more than all, the total neglect of superintendence by employers of convicts, who, armed for marauding expeditions, sometimes left their masters' premises by night, and even by day. He closed, by declaring his love to free institutions--the pride, indeed, and boast of England; but which, if conferred on such a populace, he believed would end in the corruption of all.