was checked at their own repeated request, and came to an end in 1852, this Colony, owing to a chronic shortage of labour, actually petitioned the Home Government to divert the stream of criminals to its shores, with the result that in ten years’ time nearly half the male adults in the Colony, and more than half in the towns, were, or had been, convicts.  It was not until 1865, under strong pressure from the other Colonies, that the system was finally abolished which threw Western Australia forty years behind its sister Colonies in the attainment of Home Rule.

The transportation policy has been unmercifully criticized, and with all the more justice in that Pitt, when the American war closed the traditional dumping-ground for criminals, had the chance of employing the exiled loyalists of America, many of whom were starving in London, as pioneers of the new lands in the Antipodes.  “The outcasts of an old society cannot form the foundations of a new one,” said a Parliamentary Report of July 28, 1785.  But they could do so, and did do so.  Ruskin’s saying, a propos of Australia, that “under fit conditions the human race does not degenerate, but wins its way to higher levels,” comes nearer the truth.  In an amazingly short time after the transportation policy was reversed the taint disappeared.  We must remember, however, that, sheer refuse as some of the convicts were, especially in the later period, a large number of the earlier convicts were the product of that “stupid severity of our laws” which the Vicar of Wakefield deplored, and to this category belonged many an unhappy Irish peasant, sound in character, but driven into Whiteboyism, or into the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 by some of the worst laws the human brain ever conceived.  Hundreds of these men survived the barbarous and brutalizing ordeal of a penal imprisonment to become prosperous and industrious citizens.

It was not until 1825, or thereabouts, that free white settlers, many Irishmen among them, came in any substantial number to the Mother Colony of New South Wales, and not until 1832 that these men began to press claims for the management of their own affairs, under the inspiration of an Irish surgeon’s son, William Wentworth, the Hampden of Australia.  The later Colonies rapidly came into line, Western Australia, for the reason given above, remaining stationary.  The first representative institutions were granted in 1842 to New South Wales, and in 1850 to Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania.  At that date, therefore, these settlements stood in much the same constitutional position as the Canadas had stood in 1791 (although technically their Constitutions were of a different kind), but with this important difference, that the Act of 1850, “for the better Government of Her Majesty’s Australian Colonies,” gave power to those Colonies to frame new Constitutions for themselves.  This they soon proceeded to do, each constructing its own, but all keeping in view