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 whom to entrust these difficult and important investigations. Finally it was decided to send one Commissioner only, and Mr. J. T. Bigge accepted the post with a salary of £3,000 a year. He had held judicial offices in Trinidad, and was a high-minded, conscientious, intelligent man, well fitted for his post. With him as Secretary with a reversion to the Commissioner-ship went Mr. Thomas Hobbes Scott, but whether or no he played any important part in preparing the reports it is quite impossible to say.

Bigge's commission was dated 6th January, 1819, but he did not sail until April, and his appointment was spoken of in the House of Commons as about to be made as late as March, 1819.

The year was an important one for the Colony. Bennet published his letter to Lord Sidmouth, in which he described the settlement as he knew it from the reports of Marsden, Vale and J. H. Bent, and W. C. Wentworth, the eldest son of D'Arcy Wentworth, published the first edition of his description of New South Wales, which contained some information of the agricultural condition of the Colony and an enthusiastic account of its capabilities, and put very strongly in Wentworth's rather perfervid style the need for jury trial and a legislative council. It took the place of a history of New South Wales up to 1812 written by a Mr. O'Hara, who had, however, no first-hand knowledge of the Colony. Still the interest in New South Wales was keen, for the book published in 1812 went into a second edition in 1818. The three books were criticised in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1819, by Sydney Smith with his usual colonial pessimism, and he accepted much more readily the denunciations of Bennet than the hopeful patriotism of W. C. Wentworth.

"Thus much," he concluded, "for Botany Bay. As a mere Colony it is too distant and too expensive; and, in future, will involve us of course in many of those just and necessary wars, which deprive Englishmen so rapidly of their comforts, and