lroad traversing Tasmania from north to
south would be a great benefit to the community, would stimulate trade,
and consequently production, and would aid in restoring the prosperity
which it once enjoyed.

LABOUR MARKET.

This being granted, let us take into consideration the condition of the
labour market in that country, and observe what an opportunity now
presents itself of executing a work of prodigious magnitude at a
comparatively trifling cost. It will be seen at once that I allude to the
population of probationers, pass-holders, ticket-of-leave men, who now
compete with the free inhabitants, and cause the whole land to throng
with people in want of work, with paupers and with thieves.

The great evil at present complained of by the settlers of Tasmania, is
the superabundance of labour. In most other colonies the contrary
complaint is made; and were it not for peculiar circumstances, the great
demand in one place would soon relieve the pressure in the other. But it
must be remembered, that the glut in the Tasmanian labour market is
produced by the presence of crowds of convicts, in various stages of
restraint, all prevented from leaving the island, and forced to remain
and seek employment there; so that as soon as the demand for labour falls
off, or the supply of it becomes disproportionately large, it is the free
population that is necessarily displaced.

The effect, therefore, of the gradual pouring of a superabundance of
convict labour into this island, must naturally be, first, to check free
immigration; and secondly, to drive away those who have actually
established themselves on it as their second home, and may perhaps have
abandoned comfort in England in hopes of affluence there. So great is the
number actually leaving the place every year, that it is calculated that
in six years, at the same ratio, there will be absolutely none left.

COMMERCIAL DISTRESS.

And yet, no further back than 1841, the Legislative Council voted 60,000
pounds to encourage immigration, thus needlessly taxing the colony to aid
in producing a disastrous result, which certainly, however, no one seems
to have foreseen.

Who, indeed, four years ago, could have believed that, above all other
things, there should arrive a glut in the labour market? Such an event
was looked upon as absolutely impossible in the full tide of prosperity
that covered the island. Everything wore a smiling aspect. The fields
were heavy with harvests, th