culation. The pleasing delusion was cherished by the members of the
government, whose official and private interests concurred to dupe them.
Happy were they who sold. Arthur left many who, acquiring his favour by
the extent of their outlay, and the vigour of their enterprise, were
laden with debts from which they never recovered, and a prey to
perpetual solicitude.

The great demand for sheep and cattle, created by the establishment of
new colonies, gave a temporary respite: flocks were sold at L2 per head,
and were purchased in large quantities. These ameliorations were only
transient, and the wide regions open to adventure lessened the worth of
those properties which had been valued by the farms of Great Britain,
not the unpeopled wilds of New Holland.

A just estimate of Arthur's administration, must include all the
peculiarities of his position, and the complicated interests he held in
trust, whether they relate to the imperial government, the free, or the
bond. The measures best for the colony were not always compatible with
the design of its establishment. Nor must we forget that, in surveying
the past we have lights which rarely attend the present; that much which
experience may amend, it is not possible for wisdom to foresee.

The primary object of the crown in colonising this island, was accepted
by this governor as the chief aim of his policy. The settlement of free
men he considered but subsidiary to the control and reform of the
transported offender: their claims, their duties, and their political
rights were, in his view, determined by their peculiar position. They
were auxiliaries hired by royal bounties, to co-operate with the great
machinery of punishment and reformation. As the representative of the
crown, he stood off from the colonists in their sympathies and ultimate
views. Employed not to build up a free community of Englishmen, but to
hold in check the criminality of an empire, with him the settlement was
an institution requisite to the effective execution of penal laws. Such
he found it: such he desired to mould its growth, _and to prolong its
destination_. Thus, except in the capacity of employers, he regretted
the arrival of free men, and warned the ministers of the crown, that by
their encouragement of emigration, they were destroying the value of
bond labor, the dependence of the settlers, and the adaptation of the
island for the purposes of a prison.

Thus, in his official correspondence w