deficiency of religious
principle: of the neglect and profanation of the sabbath: on which day
the worst actions were planned and perpetrated. The convict stations he
compared to "bee-hives, diligently pouring in and out; but with this
difference--the one worked by day, the other by night: the one goes
forth to industry, the other to plunder." These evils he traced to
"squatting;" the congregation of prisoner servants in Sydney; the
license of improper persons to public houses; and, more than all, the
total neglect of superintendence by employers of convicts, who, armed
for marauding expeditions, sometimes left their masters' premises by
night, and even by day. He closed, by declaring his love to free
institutions--the pride, indeed, and boast of England; but which, if
conferred on such a populace, he believed would end in the corruption of
all.

That this address gave a true description of a part of the population,
cannot be doubted; but inferences were liable to error, even on the
spot, much more when drawn at a distance. A mass of thieves under any
system, if in contact with property, must produce a mass of crime; yet
even in the worst days of transportation, the relapses were
proportionately less than under any other system of prison discipline.
In England, 30,000 such persons at large, would yield annually at least
an equal number of felonies.

The abuses which were brought to light, were certainly flagrant: the
most memorable was the instance of Nash, who took to Sydney the rich
spoil of a robbery, and set up a large drapery warehouse; and of Gough,
an assigned servant of the chief justice, who lived at large, and
carried on a quiet business as a receiver of stolen goods. Cases so
conspicuous strongly illustrated the evils of assignment. The miserable
fate of Mudie's men, compared with the condition of such persons,
naturally suggested the idea, that some new change was essential, to
protect from reproach or derision the public justice of the nation.

The appointment of a committee to promote emigration from Ireland, of
which Archbishop Whately was chairman, called attention to the subject
of transportation. It was the opinion of the committee (1836), that to
send the peasantry of Ireland to a community so polluted, was base,
cruel, and impolitic. The right reverend prelate asserted that statesmen
were tolerating a social organisation, destined one day to involve the
empire in deep disgrace, and exhibit the aw