George ARTHUR

ARTHUR, SIR GEORGE (b. Plymouth, England, 21 June 1784; d. England, 19 Sept 1854). Colonial administrator.

Born into a Church of England merchant family prominent in Plymouth, George Arthur saw service in the Napoleonic wars, reaching the rank of major by 1812. '[P]romotion', he remarked in 1814, had been 'my idol'. The context of this perception was a conversion experience, in which he became deeply convicted of personal sinfulness and the 'truth and power' of the gospel. Arthur's conversion was to redefine rather than restrict his career ambitions; it gave him access to powerful evangelical patronage in London. He regularly corresponded with leading evangelicals, including William Wilberforce, James Stephen Jr, Fowell Buxton and Zachary Macaulay. His family feared he had become a 'Methodist'. He hadn't, but did declare that Churchmen—whose 'manners, habits and pursuits' often made them averse to the 'condescension' involved in the role of being 'the very servant of slaves'—mostly proved interior to Moravians and Methodists in ministering to the moral and religious needs of natives.

In 1814 he was appointed superintendent of British Honduras, beginning a long career as colonial administrator. In that same year he married Elizabeth Usher. Effective in his work, in 1815 he was promoted to lieut-colonel. Religious interests were, however, not neglected. In 1816 he moved to make Honduras 'the base tor the spread of Christianity' in the region, but plans to enlist the new king of the Mosquito Shore in that task proved unfruitful.

From 1824 to 1836 Arthur was lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen's Land (VDL). Here he established a claim to evangelical, as well as penological, originality through his 'system' of convict administration, making the island by the late 1820s a kind of out-of-doors panopticon.

Arthur was austere in manner, efficiency-minded and autocratic; he was the steady accumulator through shrewd local investment of a large personal fortune; he was also relentlessly opportunist in VDL in seeking to translate his distinctive religio-moral concepts and theories into reality. Like most Clapham 'saints' he was thoroughly erastian, maintaining, in effect, against his senior chaplains, against Archdeacon Scott, and against Archdeacon [later Bishop] Broughton that he was pastor-in-chief as well as commander-in-chief of the colony. However it was always Arthur's way to wield the sword of mercy discreetly, remotely, through voluntary and, more especially, involuntary agents.

Through systematic invigilation and classification convict bad conduct was to be relentlessly punished, and good consistently rewarded. The choice of path taken—downward or upward—lay with the convict. The downward path led through government service in chain gangs, to places of secondary punishment such as Port Arthur, terminating at the gallows. The upward way, both secular and religious, led through assignment to free settlers, to receipt of the ticket of leave, to award of the conditional pardon, and, eventually, to full freedom. Arthur's system, he claimed, addressed 'two orders of causes of crime'—'the one pre-disposing, and internal, consisting of the evil passions of a man—the other exciting and external, consisting of all those things which may be objects of desire or ambition' [ie 'temptations']. External causes required, initially, external remedies. Transportation would remove British criminals 'from a part of the empire in which the inducements to commit crime surpass their powers of resistance, to another part [VDL] ... in which these are more nearly balanced'. Arthur once expressed this by likening transportation to moving weak plants from an exposed to a sheltered part of a garden.

The VDL 'system' was crafted to be the shelter. Under it, 'the silent yet most efficient principle of self interest' would, for most convicts, translate into at least outwardly honest convict behaviour. Further, self-interest would regulate the conduct of the masters [ie the de facto gaolers] of assigned convicts. These, recognising that the reformed convict was the better worker, would find incentive therein to play a potent reformative role: 'Bentham's notion that gaolers should possess a personal interest in the reform of convicts', Arthur rhapsodised, 'is beautifully realised in VDL'. 'We are in great measure', he once remarked, 'the creatures of education'. 'Impressions' (ie circumstances) were the crucial variable. Arthur aimed to incite to good conduct and good habits by manipulating these 'impressions'. On this external level Arthur operated with an almost Lockean concept of mind.

What of the 'internal' cause of crime—the predisposing 'evil passions'? Here ministers of religion played a specially important role in regulating the 'moral mechanism' of British and VDL society. They were, in VDL, 'the agency by which the reformation of expediency may be elevated into the reformation of principle'. (Arthur's emphasis) The chaplain's key task was to foster in convicts the development of what Arthur called 'mind' (by which he meant discomforting feelings of degradation) in convicts. Thus 'minded', shamed as well as injured by punishment, the convict would be led, step by step, to develop the 'inward (moral and religious) regulator'. In harnessing a Lockean Benthamite concept of malleable human nature with the belief that 'the heart of every man is desperately wicked', Arthur seemed unaware of the possible contradiction. But, putting this in context, precisely that seeming contradiction was common among the meliorist Calvinists of Clapham.

Arthur's punishment-redemption machine achieved significant success, at least in fostering outward respectability, but did not long survive his departure. Assignment was the crucial lever for setting newly arrived convicts on the redemptive track, however the British government, responding partly to colonial and British complaints that the assignment system 'tainted' the free elements of VDL and NSW society, but more to its growing concern that the assignment system was operating in such a way as to strip transportation of its power to terrify would-be British criminals, scrapped assignment in the late 1830s.

Respecting the VDL Aborigines, Arthur was anxiously benevolent, mostly, and eventually generous with the public purse, but unimaginative. He had little practical power, perhaps little will, to restrict settler expansion into Aboriginal hunting lands. His employment of G A Robinson (q.v.) ('The Conciliator') to remove the remnant of the Aboriginal tribes to Flinder's Island in 1831, seeking thereby both to save them from settler aggression and to convert them from hunter-gathering to farming and Christianity, brought about their demoralisation and, thereby, near-destruction.

Here Arthur's Lockean remedy of transportation to a more salutary environment came badly unstuck, as he himself eventually admitted. Later, he expressed deep distress at the 'necessity' (he still saw it as that) of 'driving a simple but warlike, and, as IT NOW APPEARS, NOBLE-MINDED RACE, from their native hunting grounds'. (Arthur's emphasis) '(D)isguise it as we may', he lamented, 'we are the intruders'. Did Arthur, seemingly reverting to the enlightenment image of the noble savage, exclude the Tasmanian Aboriginals from his otherwise general thesis of the 'predisposing... evil passions'?

Evangelical? Benthamite? Enlightened humanist? The layered, perhaps contradictory, springs of the complex conscience of 'The saint of Hobart Town' (as some enemies called him) defy neat interpretation. The only secure claim, which is also something of an evasion, is that his recall in 1836 closed a decade of singular evangelical and penological originality.

Arthur himself, writing to his nephew in VDL during the voyage home in 1837, saw, in religious terms, only personal failure and cause for penitent remorse. 'No one has more reason to cast himself unreservedly upon the providence of God than I have, for although I have deserved nothing but his wrath, yet his mercy and goodness have hitherto protected me ... What I now most desire is to give glory to God, and what I most highly lament is that I have hitherto been such an unprofitable servant to Him'.

He remained a trusted career governor, a firm evangelical but less provocatively so. From 1837-41 he was the strong-minded, rather repressive lieutenant-governor of the turbulent province of Upper Canada. In 1841 he was rewarded with a baronetcy. From 1842-46 he was governor of the Presidency of Bombay. He died in 1854, considerably wealthy and laden with conventional secular honours (eg Honorary DCL Oxford in 1848 and lieut-general in 1853). He was survived by five sons and seven daughters.

ADB 1; G Arthur, Observations Upon Secondary Punishment (Hobart, 1833); G Arthur, Defence of Transportation (London, 1835); A G L Shaw, Sir George Arthur, Bart, 1784-1854 (Melbourne, 1980)

RICHARD ELY