Broad Arrow by Caroline Leakey — Read

MR. EVELYN, senior, had been a police magistrate. Disgusted with the duties of this office, he threw up his £500 per annum, choosing rather moderate independence and liberty of conscience, than wealthy dependence and slavery to the whims of every captious holder who chose to send his servant before him. He termed the appointment the 'Wash- tub Coveship,' once having heard himself called 'The Wash-tub Cove' by a party of female prisoners whom he had just sentenced to the Government Laundry. He had also been in the Executive, but weary of the farce justice was obliged to play in dealing with men already sentenced to the utmost rigour of secondary punishment--weary of the solemn absurdities of judicial proceedings as then existing in Van Diemen's Land--weary of the oft-recurring joke of dealing law to outlaws, or of punishing convicts for falling into traps laid for them by the neglect of their officers or the shortsightedness of senators-- weary of all these, Mr. Evelyn, senior, resigned his seat in the Council.

He had seen a woman, who was already transported for life for manslaughter, again committed amid the execration of the multitude for a similar attempt in Hobart Town; and upon this woman, convicted of her second crime, he had heard passed the original sentence of transportation for life, so that while her former sin was still unexpiated, her latter and aggravated guilt went wholly unpunished. Glad that the poor wretch had yet a space afforded her for repentance Mr. Evelyn was not one to cry shame on the judgment, but, generous as were his feelings towards the murderess, he could not help casting a somewhat jealous eye on the ill-accorded leniency when he paralleled it with sentences he had known: sentences which, had they been pronounced by the injured party, had been set down as the result of implacable revenge--had they been passed by the voice of the people had been attributed to excitement; but uttered neither by the prosecutor nor by the populace, Mr. Evelyn had only to turn with a blush from the bench where justice had dwindled to a heartless form.