if he is condemned to a road gang, and after his return has little advantage from his services.  Unwillingness to work for a master who has been the cause of his punishment is a difficult feeling to counteract.  The convict has the game in his own hands:  he either does no work, wounds himself, falls sick, or perhaps, and it is not uncommon, spoils either the materials entrusted to him, or the tools which have been put into his hands.

“Mr. Busby, when asked respecting the prevalence of bush-rangers, who are escaped convicts and others who have taken to the bush, says, in his Evidence (5th Aug. 1831,) that within the last twelve months, or two years, bush-rangers have been so numerous that it was scarcely possible to travel a hundred miles on the road without being stopped:  there was scarcely a newspaper, in which there were not two or three instances of persons, of every rank, being stopped.  It was quite an unusual thing formerly—­but of late there has been a regular system of highway robbery.  The laws that have been enacted to put down this horrible state of things, will serve for an index of the condition of the colony.  They do away with every appearance of personal liberty.  ’One act empowered magistrates to issue a warrant, authorizing constables to enter or break into any house, within their district or county, by day or night, at their own discretion; and to seize any person they might suspect to be highway robbers or burglars; or any individual in the colony, without any warrant or authority, may take another into custody, on the mere suspicion that he is a convict illegally at large:  if it appear to the magistrate that he had a just or probable cause for suspicion, he is justified in doing so.  The onus of proving that he is not a convict illegally at large, is thrown upon the suspected person, and if that is not established to the satisfaction of the magistrate, he is liable to be retained in custody, or sent to Sydney to be examined and dealt with.’

“The number of executions in New South Wales in the year 1830 exceeded the whole number of executions in England and Wales, in the same year; which, taking the proportion of the populations of the countries, makes capital punishments upwards of three hundred and twenty-five times as frequent as in the mother country.  This horrid fact is pretty well, of itself, an answer to all argument drawn from the idea of Reformation.  But direct testimony is abundant.  Major McArthur, the son of one of the wealthiest and most extensive settlers in the colony, and to whom it owes so much for its present progress in production and commerce, states, ’It is painful to know that those whose sentences have expired, or to whom pardons have been granted, seldom or ever incline to reform, even when they have acquired property.  Intoxication and fraud are habitual to them; and hardly six persons can be named throughout the colony, who, being educated men, and having been transported for