engaged in trade successfully; others became agriculturists and stock and cattle owners; and not a few, who had been educated in the liberal arts and sciences, obtained professional, literary, and clerical employment. The Colony has not only profited, therefore, by their labors when in the bond class, but in a greater degree when they became free men.
The labors of the bond class accelerated greatly the material progress of the Colony, to the increase of its wealth and prosperity. The great want had been means of communication between the widely scattered settlements, the interior and the seaboard, resulting from the manner in which its first settlement was made, and the vast area in consequence occupied by a small population, thus making the transport of goods and produce, whether internal or external, in all cases difficult, in many impossible. To the labors of the convicts the Colony owes most of its roads, bridges, and public works, which are still far in advance of the number of its population. By their introduction a new market was opened for produce, and production was largely increased by the purchases made for their maintenance; and the expenditure of the salaries of officials attached to the department, and of the magistrates and police in the pay of the Imperial Government, formed a not inconsiderable item in the trade of the Colony.
Convicts were introduced in 1850, and Mr. Knight, in his remarks in the Census papers of 1870, concludes that "the large proportion reclaimed and absorbed into the general population, and the infrequency of crime, are the best proofs that the system 'was not only well considered and arranged' but has been judiciously and efficiently carried out and borne good fruit." It is true that a paid magistracy, and a large and efficient body of
