criminal law in his particular case—should have had the presumption to attempt to ruin a reputable merchant, merely because the business of that merchant interfered with his own mercantile speculations, thereby embroiling the whole colony, as was actually the fact,—is another instance of the mischievous and dangerous influence which educated convicts have so frequently acquired in the penal colonies, and of the bad purposes for which that influence has almost uniformly been employed.
The third and last instance I shall adduce of the bad effects that have resulted from the transportation of educated convicts to New South Wales, is one of a much more aggravated character, and, I am sorry to add, of much more recent occurrence. William Angus Watt, a Scotchman from the neighbourhood of Forfar, who had been employed for some time as a clerk in the office of a respectable lawyer in Edinburgh about ten years ago, was at length detected embezzling a considerable sum of money belonging to his employer; but, escaping from justice, was outlawed by the High Court of Justiciary in Scotland in the year 1827. He had in the mean time found his way to London, where he soon obtained respectable employment as a clerk or book-keeper in the extensive haberdashery house of Messrs. Todd,
