but for the introduction of transportation, which promised the
well-conducted convict the prospect of a new life in a new country.
Meanwhile, prison reform became a favourite study of benevolent
theorists in an age when the criminal law was still a relic of
barbarism, when highway robbery was rife in the neighbourhood of London,
when sanitation was hardly in its infancy, when pauperism was fostered
by the poor law, and when the working classes in towns were huddled
together, without legal check or moral scruple, in undrained courts and
underground cellars. So capricious and shortsighted is the public
conscience in its treatment of social evils.

[Pageheading: _CANADA._]

At the opening of the nineteenth century the colonial empire of Great
Britain was in a transitional state. The secession of thirteen American
colonies had not only robbed the mother country of its proudest
inheritance, but had also shattered the old colonial system of
commercial monopoly for the supposed benefit of British interests. Its
immediate effect was to annul the navigation act as affecting American
trade, which became free to all the world, and by which Great Britain
itself profited largely. Canada at once gained a new importance, and a
new sense of nationality, which Pitt recognised by dividing it into two
provinces, and giving each a considerable measure of independence, both
political and commercial. It was troubled by the presence of a conquered
race of white colonists side by side with new colonists of English
blood, who were, however, united in their resistance to the revolted
colonies in the war of 1812-14. After the war a steady stream of
immigration poured into Canada. In 1816 the population was estimated at
450,000; between 1819 and 1829 Canada received 126,000 immigrants from
England, and during the next ten years 320,000. The result was that the
French element ceased to be preponderant, except in Lower Canada. The
French Canadians felt that they did not enjoy their share of the
confidence of government; the home government, ready enough to grant any
favour that home opinion would permit, was trammelled by a public
opinion, which suspected all who were of a French origin of a desire to
restore the supremacy of the Roman Catholic religion and to assert
political independence. A vacillating policy was the result, which only
increased suspicions, and led in the first year of the reign of Victoria
to a civil war.

In the Mauritius a