en, a member of parliament, long resident in that country, stated
that he had been often asked what offence would be sufficient to ensure
transportation.[194] The letters received from the prisoners, recorded
their good fortune, and were read by their former acquaintances. They
were filled with exaggerations, dictated by vanity or affection; and
seemed to convey an impression that, of their families, they only were
fortunate.

A colonist is certainly not entitled to deny, that many strong cases of
perversion occurred; but, except the superiority of diet, and the high
value of labor common to new countries when they prosper at all, the
descriptions given were mostly illusive and mistaken. The extreme misery
and degradation endured by many, and to which all were liable, rendered
the ordinary condition of prisoners one which could not have been
desired, except by the most wretched of the people.

New South Wales was regarded, by the laughing portion of the British
public, as a perpetual beggar's opera. One eminent writer said, that the
people of these colonies attracted attention only from the curiosity
they excited: mankind were amused to know what form would be assumed by
a community, composed of men who narrowly escaped the executioner. By
another they were compared to an old fashioned infant, which had all the
vices and deformity of a corrupt constitution and precocious passions.
The exhibition of a panorama of Sydney in the metropolis of England,
attracted large crowds. It was hardly possible to exaggerate the charms
of its scenery, when clothed in the radiant verdure of the spring; but
the dwellings were drawn, not only in their just proportions, but with
all the grace of the pencil--cabins looked like bowers. The poet,
Campbell, struck with the glowing harmony, exclaimed, how delightful to
the London thief--beneath the clear sky and amidst the magnificent
forests of Australia,

"Where Sydney Cove its lucid bosom swells"--

to shake the hand he once encountered in the same pocket at Covent Garden
theatre! It is thus, too often, that substantial interests are sacrificed
to humour. No one, acquainted with the minds of prisoners, can imagine
that the purest atmosphere, or most exhilarating prospect, would be
half so attractive to a veteran robber, as the murky cellars of the
"London Shades."

The writings of Archbishop Whately tended to the same result. Against
the principles of transportation he entered an earnest