their better reason to hold their lives and property on the most precarious of all tenures, the caprice of the elements.  But could the governor succeed in this, his project to the utmost, could he induce every settler on the banks of the Hawkesbury to remove to these townships, he would be still far from guaranteeing the colony from the calamitous effects of these inundations; since they are not periodical, like the risings of the Nile, but happen at all times, as well when the crops are in stack as when growing, when they are in the infancy of vegetation, as when they have attained maturity and are fit for the sickle.  Some other expedient, therefore, would still be necessary to guard against those inundations which may happen at such disastrous periods; and there is but one that will be found sufficient at all times and under all circumstances.  It is to encourage by artificial means, the growth of corn so far beyond what is necessary for the bare purposes of food, that in years of scarcity, whether arising from flood or drought, these artificial channels of consumption may be stopped, and the whole of the corn in the colony appropriated to the supply of the inhabitants.  And this encouragement would be amply afforded by the establishment of distilleries; since allowing the colony to require sixty thousand gallons of spirits annually, twenty thousand bushels of grain would be expended in distillation, the whole of which, when necessity required, might be diverted from its ordinary course of consumption, and directed to the purposes of subsistence.

These advantages, great as they must be allowed to be, are not the only ones that would follow the erection of distilleries.  This measure would still further promote the prosperity of the agricultural body, by creating in the market a competition with the government for the purchase of grain, and would thus destroy the maximum, that has been hitherto arbitrarily assigned as an equivalent for their produce generally, without reference to the state of the crops, whether they have been productive or otherwise.  The prejudicial operation of this maximum was noticed in the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons made in the year 1812, and the propriety of devising some remedy for this evil strongly enforced; but this recommendation has hitherto been disregarded, from the want, perhaps, of information sufficiently precise to enable the government of this country to attend to it.

I close the catalogue of arguments which I adduce in support of this measure with the last and most powerful of them all, its beneficial influence on the morality of the rising generation.  I do not so much take into calculation its probable bearing on the existing race of colonists, the greater part of whom are and will, perhaps, always be more or less addicted to the pernicious habits contracted in their early days of riot and debauchery, as on their posterity, who will necessarily soon form the majority of this