1. The first, and without doubt the most influential cause of the comparative failure of the transportation system, as it has hitherto been administered in the Australian penal colonies, is the want of a free emigrant and virtuous population, to afford the requisite stimulus to reformation, and to repress the general tendency to criminality.

It has become fashionable of late for those writers in England who decry the whole system of transportation as essentially impolitic and inexpedient, to endeavour to enlist the authority of the celebrated Lord Bacon in support of their