the waste land; especially as the employment of a large number of convicts in the district would enable the government to receive a considerable portion of the payment in produce.
In regard to the convicts, the sort of labour in which they would thus be engaged, in clearing land for the settlement of free emigrants, and in forming roads from one settlement to another, would combine all the requisites which Earl Bathurst so judiciously establishes as indispensably necessary in a system of management for transported criminals, by affording the means of enforcing strict discipline, regular labour of a severe description, and constant superintendence." Besides, if transportation should be restricted in future to convicts under sentence for fourteen years or for life, and if the present ticket of leave system, by which a convict for these periods respectively is allowed conditional freedom within a certain district at the end of six or eight years,—if this system should still be continued; the convict, who had been constantly employed for either of these long periods in labour of this description, would naturally be induced, on the attainment of his conditional freedom, to set up for himself as a free labourer in the district in that particular line; in which there will always be a great demand for labour in the colony. He would be able, for instance, to
