a statement for the _Encyclopedie Methodique_, in
which he asserted that the convict element of the American population
was too small to deserve enumeration. He estimated the total number at
2,000, and their descendants at 4,000, in 1785, or something more than
one-thousandth part of the entire people. This calculation has been,
perhaps justly, charged with partiality; but it is useless to meet error
by conjecture.[50] This obvious topic of sarcasm was early adopted.
Party writers poisoned the shafts of political warfare, by references to
the convict element of the trans-atlantic population: "their Adam and
Eve emigrated from Newgate,"[51]--"their national propensities to
fraud, they inherited from their convict ancestors,"--"they are the
offspring of convicts, and they have retained the disposition of their
felon progenitors." Such were the sayings of critics, lords, and
statesmen: it was thus they described a people, who among their
forefathers can enumerate heroes and saints; who, flying from the
scourge of bigotry and despotism, laid the foundation of an empire. Can
we expect more complacency?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: _Oration, pro A. Coesin._]

[Footnote 38: _Tacitus_, ann. 285.]

[Footnote 39: _Discourse, by the Right Hon. Wm. Eden, on Banishment._]

[Footnote 40: _Robertson's History of America._]

[Footnote 41: See _Blackstone's Commentaries_, vol. iv. c. 31.]

[Footnote 42: _Rastall's Statutes_, p. 419.]

[Footnote 43: Chalmers.]

[Footnote 44: _Eden's Discourse._]

[Footnote 45: _Sir Joshua Child's Discourses on Trade_, 1670.]

[Footnote 46: _Letter from James II._, in the colonial-office: quoted by
Chalmers.]

[Footnote 47: Introduction to _Phillip's Voyages_.]

[Footnote 48: See _Bentham's Letter to Lord Pelham_.]

[Footnote 49: _Vicar of Wakefield._]

[Footnote 50: Dr. Lang, on whose quotation (from the _Memoirs of
Jefferson_, vol. i. p. 406) the above is given, would make the total
number to be 50,000--a vast difference!]

SECTION II.

During and subsequent to the American war, the prisons of Great Britain
were crowded. A distemper, generated in the damp and foetid atmosphere
of gaols, carried off thousands: to be charged with an offence, was to
be exposed to the risk of a malady generally fatal. Sometimes, it passed
beyond the precincts of prisons: at Taunton, the judges and other
officers of the court, and hundreds of the inhabitants, perished.

Howard, after spending a larg