e roads crowded with traffic; gay equipages
filled the streets; the settler's cottage or villa was well supplied with
comfort, and even with luxuries; crime, in a population of which the
majority were convicts or their descendants, was less in proportion than
in England; in short, for the first time, in 1840 the exports exceeded
the imports; trade was brisk, agriculture increasing, new settlers were
arriving; everything betokened progress; no one dreamed of retrogression
or decay.

In four years all this has been reversed. We now look in vain for the
signs of prosperity that before existed. In their place, we hear of
complaints loud and deep; of insolvency, of reduction in the Government
expenditure; of a falling off of trade; of many beggars, where none
before were known; of large agricultural estates allowed partially to
return to their natural wildness; of cattle and all stock sold at half
their original cost, and of every symptom of agricultural and commercial
distress. I may further add, that the funds derived from the sale of
Crown lands in Tasmania in the year 1841, amounted to 58,000 pounds; in
1844, to 2000 pounds; and in 1845, to nothing. The revenue, in the same
time, has decreased one half; and, to close the financial account, at the
end of 1844 the colony was in debt to the Treasury, 100,000 pounds.

REMARKS ON CONVICT DISCIPLINE.

Though many other causes may have co-operated in producing this change,
it seems acknowledged by most persons, that the result is chiefly
traceable to the disproportionate increase of the convict population,
acting in the manner I have already described; and this is itself
encouragement to reconsider the system of 1842. But if, as some maintain,
this plan has inflicted serious evils, in a moral point of view, both on
the free population and on the convicts themselves, there is still
greater inducement to examine whether some better mode could not be
devised.

I do not intend, however, to enter into the question of convict
discipline. It would be beside my purpose to do so; and want of space,
moreover, forbids it. But I cannot refrain from observing, that one
feature in the new plan--that of congregating criminals during one period
of their punishment in probation gangs, almost isolated from the free
settlers--seems productive of anything but good. Under the system of
assignment, whatever other objections there may have been to it, the
convict had at least an excellent chance