A commissioner or agent might be appointed for the purposes of inspecting the stores and various articles sent to New South Wales, whose duty it would be to see the articles shipped correctly, and thus to prevent those omissions which are daily in the habit of occurring, and which are of more consequence than may, at first glance, be imagined.  This person might also be beneficially employed in comparing the stores shipped with the receipts of the masters, so as to preclude all possibility of practices which are inconsistent with the welfare of the government, but which are too common, and can only be prevented by the adoption of such a measure as the one which I now propose.  Whenever the governor of the colony should send over a requisition, this agent ought immediately to be furnished with an extract from his excellency’s correspondence, so that by these means the requisition would not be liable to neglect, and much trouble would be spared to the Public Office, whose province it had previously been to attend to this department.  The reduction of expense which would result from this appointment would be much more than adequate to the increased expense incurred by the appointment and remuneration of a gentleman of probity and respectability to this office.

The method of conveying convicts from England is so very inhuman, that some better and more benevolent measure ought to be adopted.  The lives of these unfortunate victims of depravity ought surely to be regarded with as much care as those of any other class of his Majesty’s subjects; the contrary of this has, however, been too frequently the case, and some of the masters of the transports who have been entrusted with these captives, have treated them with such uniform rigour that numbers have perished through the intensity of their sufferings.  This want of care is to be attributed to the former custom of contracting for the transport of the convicts at so much per head, so that the master has no interest in the preservation of those entrusted to his care.  This evil, too, might also be remedied by the contract being made only for the number which might be landed in New South Wales, and by which means the owner of the transport would study to preserve the life of each individual with the most studious attention, since the loss of a single life would be a diminution of his profit, and there could no longer be a danger of the unhappy prisoners being suffered to perish from any negligence or severity.  In addition to this, the surgeon and the master might receive a reward for each person whom they delivered in good order, if their humanity was such as to require a pecuniary stimulus.  I believe this has been tried in some instances, at least report has so stated, and, if so, there must have been sufficient evidence gained of the superiority of the method over that which was formerly adopted.  It might not be a bad plan to try if some of the superfluous frigates in the service might not be converted into