Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/214

 management, and at a comparatively small expense to government, a line of penal settlements, and settlements of a mixed character, like the one proposed at Moreton Bay, might be formed successively along the east and north coasts of New Holland, from Port Macquarie to Dampier's Archipelago, to be successively converted into absolutely free colonies, in the order of their formation; ticket of leave men, and convicts who had earned conditional pardons by their good behaviour, to be left in the capacity of servants or labourers for hire, to the free emigrant population, on the abandonment of each establishment as a penal settlement.

By the three modes of employing convict labour, which I have thus described,—1st, on roads and other public works within the present colonial territory, or rather from Port Macquarie to Bass's Straits; 2nd, in clearing land, and making the other preparations requisite for the establishment of free emigrant settlers on the east coast of New Holland, from Port Macquarie to the southern tropic; and, 3rd, at one or more penal settlements on the north coast of the Australian continent;—there would not only be found sufficient employment for all the convicts that might be transported from Great Britain and Ireland for a century to come, without increasing the present