of them, that this estimate referred to the colony of Virginia alone; the comparison which he institutes being made with the population of that colony at the commencement of the war, and not with that of the United States generally. On the publication of Governor Phillip's 'Voyage to New South Wales' in the year 1790, an estimate of the number of convicts annually transported to America, for some time previous to the war, was made expressly for that work, (if I am not mistaken, by the Honourable Mr. Eden, afterwards Lord Auckland, a nobleman who had much better access to correct information on the subject of transportation than President Jefferson; who besides had no prejudice to bias him respecting it, and who had himself been in America, in the capacity of envoy-extraordinary from Great Britain during the war;) and the result of that estimate was, that the number so transported had been about two thousand every year.[1] Allowing, however, that this estimate was as much above the truth as President Jefferson's was below it, I conceive it may be taken for granted, that, as the system of transporting criminals to America had been in practice
- ↑ The number transported to New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land has been as high in one year as six thousand; but the average number is considerably lower.
