the communication, in which Sir C. Fitzroy was told that "if the Legislative Council should object to receive convicts without free immigration at the expense of the home government according to the stipulation of the compromise, the transmission of convicts would be stopped, and application made to parliament for the means of fulfilling the original promise," was considered as approaching insult, because it was evident that -during at least nearly twelve months between the penning of that despatch to the receipt of an answer, transportation must flow on. From that time compromise was impossible; the breach of faith became a potent rhetorical weapon in the hands of political agitators. The excitement and fury of all parties was such, that it only needed the presence of an obstinate and haughty governor to provoke a rebellious outburst. Fortunately Governor Fitzroy preferred a pleasant day on the race- course to any assertion of vice-royal attributes.
In 1849, the Hashemy convict-ship arrived in Sydney harbour. At one of the largest public meetings ever held in that city, speeches of the most violent character were delivered, and resolutions passed, calling upon the governor to send back the cargo of England's crimes to England. At the same time certain of the great flockowners—the political Buckinghams and Newdegates of the colony—eagerly engaged the ticket-of-leave men, tamed somewhat by penitentiary discipline, and all unencumbered by wives and families, at lower wages, in preference to a thousand free emigrants, consisting of men, women, and children, who arrived at the same time.
In the latter end of 1848 the results of distress in England and famine in Ireland were felt in Australia in the shape of an inflowing of free emigrants more numerous than had been received since the frantic mania of 1841; and this was increased to such an extent in 1849, that little short of thirteen thousand labouring people were landed in Sydney, and an equal number at Port Phillip. An addition of many thousand free emigrants to the population could not fail to produce an effect on the anti-transportation feelings of the colony. It is self-evident that when emigrants begin to flock freely into a colony, the period for employing convict labour has passed.
In 1849, the Legislative Council answered Earl Grey's extraordinary reading of the compromise offered him in 1848, by voting an address to the Queen in which they protested against the adoption of any measure by which the colony would be degraded into a penal settlement, "and entreated her Majesty to revoke the order in Council by which New South Wales had been again made a place to which British offenders may be transported." That in this address they only echoed the
