government, at any former period during the last twenty years, to effect such an entire change in the future disposal and management of convicts in New South Wales, as the present circumstances of the colony imperatively demand, and as may now be effected with the utmost facility, and without entailing any additional expense on the mother country. In such circumstances, although His Majesty's present ministers are in no respect responsible for the evils that have unhappily resulted from a state of things originated under a previous
had entrusted the complete monopoly of its means. Why, could Mr. B. be. ignorant, for instance, that not only at Hunter's River, to the northward, where his own farm was situated, but at Illawarra to the southward, and in Argyle to the south-westward, there were whole hundreds of miles of settled country, containing thousands of inhabitants both free and bond, in the year 1831, without either a clergyman or a schoolmaster, a church or a school? Had his Majesty's government depended for their information, respecting the intellectual and moral condition of New South Wales, on such evidence as Mr. Busby's, they would just have let well alone, agreeably to the common proverb. At all events, they would never have either discovered or recognised the absolute necessity for making effectual provision for the education and the religious instruction of the colony, as has recently been done, to their own lasting honour, as well as to the gratification of all classes of the colonists, by the Whig Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Right Honourable Lord Glenelg, and the Whig governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke.
