having been formed exclusively "of the scum of the people," and of "wicked, condemned men;"—a mode of planting colonies, which Lord Bacon rightly designates as "a shameful and unblessed thing."
The very different results that must inevitably follow from the two systems of penal colonization we have been describing,—viz., that of leaving the outpourings of a thousand gaols to ferment into a body politic of its own accord, and that of employing them., so to speak, in the way of manure, to enable the colonial plant to strike its roots more vigorously into the virgin soil,—are evident, in some measure, in the comparative condition of the prison population, and of society in general, in the two penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land. The latter of these colonies was settled at a much later period than the former; and, at a comparatively early period in its history as a penal settlement, it became the resort of a large number of respectable free emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, who, with their families and free servants, settled all over the island. Society in that settlement was thus differently organized and constituted from the very first, as compared with its organization and constitution in New South Wales: penal discipline was consequently much better administered than in the older colony, a§ it
