all the three classes above mentioned,—whose demoralizing influence on colonial society has been evident to every observer, and alarmingly extensive,—I question whether there would remain as many as five thousand reputable persons of the whole number to exert an influence of an opposite tendency, and to counteract the additional moral poison diffused over the whole territory, during the period of their successive arrival, in the shape of twenty-eight thousand additional convicts fresh from the gaols of England.
It must therefore be evident, that the transportation system, as a system for the prevention of crime and the reformation of criminals, must have been totally different in its character and effects before the war of American independence, from what it has been ever since. Such a colony as a convict colony was never heard of in America; neither was there ever any such task imposed on any colony on that continent, in the way of controlling and reforming criminals, as the British government have recklessly imposed on the virtuous portion of the free emigrant popu-
these vessels in the port of Sydney. Both of these vessels, moreover, had arrived in the colony more than a twelvemonth after Sir Edward Tarry and Bishop Broughton had left it, and the matters in question were consequently as little known to either of them, as they could have been to any man in England.
