impolicy of the government, and not to the sterility of the country, that this retrogradation is to be attributed.  Prosperity and happiness belong to no climate, they are indigenous to no soil:  they have been known to fly the allurements of the fertile vale, and to nestle on the top of the barren mountain:  the plains of Latium could not secure their stay, yet have they freely alit on the snow-capt summits of Helvetia:  they have been the faithful companions of freedom in all her wanderings and persecutions:  they have never graced the triumphs of injustice and oppression.

I have now hastily sketched the principal incidents which have characterized the march of this colony during the last fifteen years.  If I have neglected representing its more early efforts; if I have excluded from view the amazing difficulties and privations with which its immediate founders had to contend; if, in fine, I have altogether omitted in the picture the numerous interesting events that took place during the first fifteen years of its establishment, I have been induced to all these omissions by a conviction, that the existing system of government, if not the most eligible that could have been devised, was at least unproductive of those glaring ill consequences, with which it has subsequently been attended.  A singleness of design and a unity of action, could not be deviated from during the period of its infancy by the most ignorant and inexpert bungler in political science.  There was a broad path open to its government, which it could not possibly mistake.  The colony as yet entirely dependent on external supplies, always precarious from their very nature, but rendered still more so by a tedious, and at that time almost unexplored navigation, would unavoidably turn its whole attention to the single object of raising food, and emancipating itself as soon as possible, from so uncertain and dangerous a dependence.  The principle of fear would have sufficed to propel the colonists to a spontaneous application of their strength to the realization of this end, independent of any directing power whatever.  It was, therefore, only on the attainment of this most important point, that the impolicy of the present form of government became a matter of speculation, and subsequently, that it has been demonstrated by its practical result,—­the wretched situation to which it has reduced a colony, that might be made, as I have satisfactorily established, one of the most useful and flourishing appendages of the empire.  It is at the epoch when the produce of the colonists began to exceed the demand, and when their industry, instead of being encouraged and directed into new channels of profitable occupation, was not only left to its own blind unguided impulse, but also placed under the most impolitic and oppressive restrictions, that I have taken up the pencil, and made a rapid but faithful delineation of the deplorable consequences that have been attendant on a concatenation of injudicious