Justice & Law Quote by Charles Sturt

“In a colony constituted like that of New South Wales, the proportion of crime must of course be great” is the cool, confident voice of empire doing what it often did best: turning a political decision into a natural law. Sturt’s “must of course” isn’t just an observation; it’s a pre-emptive shrug, a rhetorical move that makes crime feel inevitable, even structural. By framing New South Wales as “constituted” in a particular way, he quietly points the finger at the colony’s origins as a penal settlement without having to say “Britain shipped its problems here.” The passive construction helps. No one is actively responsible; the system simply is, and the outcomes simply follow.

As an explorer writing from within the machinery of expansion, Sturt’s intent reads as part diagnosis, part justification. The line reassures a metropolitan audience that disorder in the colony isn’t evidence of administrative failure or moral rot in the imperial project; it’s the predictable byproduct of population design. Subtext: if you build a society by dumping convicts, soldiers, and opportunists at the edge of the world, you shouldn’t be scandalized when it doesn’t behave like a tidy English county.

Context matters, too. Early New South Wales was a harsh, uneven place: coerced labor, scarcity, violent discipline, and widening inequality. “Crime” in that environment is slippery - often less about innate depravity than about survival, resistance, or the criminalization of the poor. Sturt’s sentence flattens that complexity into a tidy metric, a colonial way of seeing that treats human turbulence as a predictable statistic rather than a political consequence.