Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/172

 this kind, even for wages; especially while employment of a more eligible description could be obtained with facility. There would thus be a constant and a constantly increasing demand for convict labour for public works within the territory: and that demand would, I am confident, afford immediate employment for at least ten thousand convicts—a much larger number than the government would have to dispose of for a considerable time to come, even though the system of assignment should be immediately discontinued.

There is this peculiar advantage in employing convicts only in such public works as I have enumerated,—that the labour, if at all severe and incessant, as it ought unquestionably to be, is exceedingly irksome, and must necessarily he felt as a punishment. But such a mode of employing convicts has various other advantages to recommend it. It would enable the government to pursue one uniform system of procedure towards all convicts of the same degree of criminality in the eye of the law, whether in regard to food or clothing, labour or restraint, rewards or punishments. Efficient superintendence, solitary confinement by night, and regular religious instruction, could also be afforded under such a system of management, much more easily than under the assignment system; while exemplary