much better for all purposes of penal discipline, and turned eventually to much better account both to the government and to the public. Why, there are perhaps fifty localities on the Brisbane River, and the other two large rivers that empty themselves into Moreton Bay, highly eligible for towns and agricultural settlements; and if the convicts at that settlement had been employed in clearing the way for the formation of such towns and settlements in these localities, the value of the land would have been prodigiously enhanced to the government, and a free emigrant population, of many thousand souls, might have been introduced into it, direct from the mother country, and settled comfortably, first as tenants, and afterwards as proprietors in the course of a very few years. But ignorance, incapacity, and mismanagement have too frequently been the presiding spirits, wherever the employment of convict labour has been concerned in the Australian colonies. I have even been told, on unquestionable authority, that the commandant at a penal settlement in Van Dieman's Land, who had been asking directions at head quarters for the employment of the convicts under his charge, was actually desired, in a letter addressed to him on the subject by authority, to make them dig two deep pits at a considerable distance from each other, and then fill
