Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/72

 once mistaken. To carry out Lord Bacon's own metaphor, I would observe, that as the goodliest herbs and the most valuable fruit-trees, when first planted in the earth, have their roots covered or surrounded in the shape of manure with the filthiest and the most abominable of physical substances, so may a certain portion of the moral abominations of the empire, in the shape of "wicked, condemned men," be so disposed around the roots of that vigorous plant, a British colony, as to enable it to strike these roots the more quickly and the more deeply into the virgin soil.

It was not the object of the founders of the colony of New South Wales to form a community to consist exclusively of convict materials,—to accumulate a mere dunghill, so to speak, for the British empire. They had other and far higher objects in view. Their object was to employ the transported criminal, whom his mother country had vomited out of her political system, in preparing the way for a settlement of freemen at the ends of the earth; where, his spirit harassed with toil, ignominy, and privation, and deprived of all hope of ever returning to the scenes of his former crimes and temptations, he might be led to bethink himself of his past enormities, and to return to the paths of virtue,—encouraged by the good