forthwith in carrying out a thousand virtuous and industrious families to Moreton Bay, including a fair proportion of children, with a clergyman and schoolmaster for each hundred families, ten parishes would be formed and settled in that district in the course, perhaps, of twelve or eighteen months, not only with every prospect of success to the free emigrants, but with every prospect of exerting such a powerful moral influence on the convict population of the district, as has never yet been exerted on that class of the inhabitants of the Australian colonies.
As there are three parties that would be differently affected by such an arrangement, it may not be out of place to form an estimate of its probable bearings on each of them; I mean the emigrants themselves, the government, and the convicts.
In regard to the free emigrants, the climate of Moreton Bay, though somewhat hotter than that of Sydney, is equally salubrious; while the banks of the Brisbane river, and of the other two navigable streams that empty themselves into the Bay, together with the upland interior, present a vast extent of land of the very first quality, sufficient, at all events, to afford eligible localities for at least ten thousand families. Wheat grows sufficiently well on the uplands at Moreton Bay, but maize, or
