economically trading or political objects;
that, in point of fact, they were established in any other sense than as
metropolitan prisons, for the safe keeping, punishment, and moral
reclamation and reform of those _quasi_ incorrigible offenders, those
criminal pests, by which the health of society was distempered, and its
safety endangered in the parent state. Therefore, whatever the military or
other expenditure incurred, it must be as much an obligation in its
supreme or corporate capacities upon the state benefited, as the support
of the criminal jurisdiction at home in all its ramifications, from the
chief judges of the land down to the lowest turnkey at Newgate. We need
not stop to enquire in what proportion the manufacturing system, with the
immoral schools of radicalism, irreligionism, and Anti-corn-Law Cobdenism,
have contributed to people the penal settlements, and, _pro tanto_, to
aggrieve the national treasury. Certain it is, and a truth which will not
be questioned, that by far the largest share of that criminal refuse has
been cast off by and from the manufacturing districts; and of which,
therefore, the colonial trade portion indirectly contributed should be
rateably the minimum, as compared with foreign trade. In his _Statistics
of the Colonies of the British Empire_, Mr Montgomery Martin remarks of
New South Wales, that "it should be observed that a large part of the
military force is required to guard the prisoners." Let us take the number
of troops so employed at 2600, which will not be far from the mark, the
corresponding home reserve of which will be 1300 more, and we then arrive,
with the help of Mr Cobden's arithmetic, and starting from his own fixed
datum of total charge, at a sum, in round numbers, of L265,000 army
expenditure for the three penal colonies; the more considerable proportion
of which must at least be set down as arising indirectly from foreign
trade, and certainly far the least from colonial, so far as chargeable
upon either.

We have next, taking Mr Cobden's rule of practice, about L.50,000 actual
military expenditure in St Helena, to which add reserve in England, and a
total of about L.70,000 is arrived at; which cannot be placed to colonial
account as for colonial purposes, since the island is purely a military
and refreshment station for vessels _en route_ for China, India, and the
seas circumflowing; and foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the
guilt of its expense as