With respect to the expediency or even practicability of instituting a body of this nature so long as fourteen years back, I am aware that there exists a great difference of opinion among the respectable class of the colonists themselves.  For my own part, however small may have been the number of those from or by whom a colonial legislature could at that time have been formed, I consider of but little moment in solving this great problem.  The only question it appears to me to be ascertained, is, whether a legislative assembly, however small the number of whom it might have been composed, and however limited the body of electors by whom it might have been chosen, would not have done its utmost to promote its own interests, or what would have been the same thing, the welfare of the community which it represented.  I cannot conceive the possibility of any one’s doubting that such would have been its conduct; and in this case what power could have been instituted in the colony that would have been so well calculated to foster its infant efforts, and develope its nascent prosperity, as one that would have been invested with the faculties of legislation; or in other words, with the authority to enact as a matter of course those measures of which the existing government has not had sufficient influence to procure the authorization.

The expediency, however, of having established a house of assembly in the colony at the period in question, is at this moment, perhaps, rather a matter of curious speculation, than of profitable inquiry.  Extensively beneficial, as would in all probability have been its effects, it is nevertheless useless to deplore an omission which cannot now be remedied.  Nor has the absence, perhaps, of this important institution been altogether without its advantages.  It has at least indisputably proved the inefficiency of the present system of government, and that the colony could not have sunk under any other form of administration whatever, to a lower ebb of poverty and wretchedness, nor have become a heavier and more unproductive burthen to the mother country.  The want, therefore, of an internal legislature has combined every consideration that could be adduced in proof of the necessity of changing the present system, and adopting in its stead that form of government which has been found so salutary and efficacious in all countries where it has been established.  The only question that remains to be ascertained, is whether the colony is now in a state of maturity for the reception of so important a privilege as the elective franchise; and this I conceive will be best answered by a reference to the numerical strength of its free population.  At the general muster or census concluded on the 19th of November, 1817, there were found to be in all the various settlements and districts of the colony of New South Wales, and its dependencies, twenty thousand three hundred and twenty-eight souls, of whom sixteen thousand six hundred and sixty-four were in the various