xpence
was L193,775 10s. 83/4d. and in 1817 it
was L229,152 6s. 31/4d. being nearly
treble the annual amount in the year 1797. This estimate, indeed,
includes the cost of transportation; and the rapid increase that
has taken place of late years in the sum total, has been in a
considerable degree occasioned by the great increase in the
number of criminals sent out to the colony; but still that there
has been a regularly progressive augmentation to the internal
expenditure is quite incontrovertible.

It requires no great portion of discernment to foretel that
while the present prohibitory system remains in force; while the
colony is alike prevented from profiting by its natural
productions, and from calling into life the artificial ones of
which it is capable, that it must continue an increasing burthen
and expence to the power on which it is dependent for support,
and which thus unwisely restrains its exertions. If the
consideration of the benefits which this country might eventually
derive from encouraging the growth and exportation of such
products as this colony might furnish; if the prospect of finding
at no very remote period in a part of our own dominions, various
raw materials essential to the fabrication of some of our staple
manufactures, and for which we are at present wholly dependent on
foreigners; if, in fine, the certainty of extending, instead of
destroying, a market for the consumption of those manufactures
themselves, be not motives of sufficient weight and cogency to
draw the attention of his majesty's ministers to the impolitic
and destructive order of things, which prevents the
accomplishment of these desirable ends; it is at least to be
hoped in these times of universal embarrassment, when the cry of
distress is resounding from one end of the kingdom to the other,
that the desire of effecting a retrenchment in this part of the
public expenditure, which has swelled to so enormous an amount,
solely from ignorance and mismanagement, will at length excite
inquiry, and give rise to a system that will unfetter the
colonists, and by gradually enabling them to support themselves,
no longer render them an unproductive and increasing burden to
this country. It is useless, and indeed absurd, for the
government to be sending out incessant injunctions for economy,
and to be eternally insisting upon the necessity of effecting
retrenchments, which their own impolitic restrictions render
impossible. The additio