ected and unfortunate, placed under the guidance and encouraged
by the countenance of benevolent men, acquire both the principles and
habits of ordinary society. The affections of domestic life are all
awakened. The parent feels a new interest in the world: his share in the
common prosperity excites the sentiment of patriotism. He promotes his
children's education with unusual care; but it is at this stage of life
that his heart endures a pang which legislators never contemplated.

The occasional prosperity of the transported person has been the
opprobrium of the laws. He rises above his former condition; becomes a
master where he was a bondman; patronises public amusements, and rides
in his chariot past the pedestrian who received him in bonds. Great
changes in condition are common everywhere: but transportation presents
the whole career of the exile, from the bar to the civic hall, as parts
of the one drama. A pardoned offender is lost in the population of Great
Britain. Were the changes in his fortune noticed, it would occasion no
reflection on the laws; but when numbers ascend under the same auspices,
their prosperity is flagrant, and stands in ludicrous contrast with the
predictions of the magistrate, who opened up a field of successful
enterprise when he pronounced the sentence of transportation.

The colonial aspect of transportation is, to a British statesman, a
secondary question: thus the injury of a distant community is of
inconsiderable importance. If the expatriated classes carry out with
them their ignorance, disorder, and crime, they retard the progress and
destroy the reputation of a distant country, but the nation may still be
satisfied: she may balance the evil and the good, and find herself the
gainer. The colony is injured; but the parent country is saved. Thus
transportation not only removes the habitual criminal, it extinguishes
the embers of insurrection: it prevents the dreaded war between property
and poverty, and silently withdraws a mass of dangerous discontent.

Of those transported a great proportion, if in England, would be in
prisons; or, if at large, preying on the world--following their old
calling, as burglars, coiners, and sheep-stealers. They would be active
incendiaries and anarchists: they would be out at every riot, and by
throwing their numbers into the scale of sedition, overturn all order,
and even change the constitution. Such have been the conclusions of
English statesmen: pe