Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/69

 is now happily delivered from that system of Tory neglect and mismanagement, under which it was suffered to grow up to comparative maturity,—like a noxious weed thrown over a garden wall and alighting accidentally on a dunghill,—and to which alone it owes its convict character, its convict feelings, its convict claims; I trust the same principle of thorough reform, which has already been so beneficially exemplified in other departments of the public service, will, ere long, be extended to that important dependency of the empire, in the way of providing an effectual remedy, in so far as such a remedy can yet be provided, for those great evils that have already resulted, and may yet result to it, from the mismanagement of the transportation system. But, as the nature of the remedy to be applied, in the case of any existing evil, can only be ascertained from a thorough knowledge of the nature and extent of that evil, I shall endeavour, in the course of the following chapters, to point out some of the causes that have hitherto operated most powerfully in occasioning the comparative failure of the transportation system, both as a means of preventing crime, and of reforming criminals, in the Australian colonies.