country, on the ground of its being expended for the due control and custody of refractory convicts transported from Great Britain and Ireland; and the appropriation in question was ordered by the Right Honourable Secretary, under the idea that the ordinary revenue of the colony would be inadequate to meet so large an addition to its annual expenditure. Now supposing that this had actually been the case, it was most impolitic for the mother country to effect so paltry a saving on the annual expense of maintaining her unruly convicts beyond seas, at so prodigious an expense to the moral welfare of a flourishing colony, and at so great a loss to herself in a different respect: for the annual importation of three thousand additional free emigrants into New South Wales, which the misappropriated revenue could have effected, would not only have enabled the colony to meet the whole amount of its police expenditure at a much earlier period; but the very outlay of that revenue for such a purpose would have afforded a seasonable relief to the mother country, both by carrying off so large an additional number of her superabundant inhabitants of the labouring classes, and by giving profitable employment, for at least six months together, to at least fifteen or twenty of her ships.
So strong, however, was the demonstration of
