shop and sell openly) or resorted for the purchase of goods on their own accounts.  At the prosperity, however, and importance of this faction, the present governor has levelled many a deadly blow within these last nine years; but more particularly in prohibiting the military to hold lands, or to be concerned in traffic, in raising to situations of the highest trust and dignity many deserving persons who had been convicts, and in throwing open the ports of the colony to an unlimited importation of all sorts of merchandize.  But he has not effected these radical and salutary changes in the colonial policy without having encountered a long and inveterate hostility.  Many have been the attempts which this faction have made to vilify his motives and misrepresent his actions; but to every charge of his enemies his unshaken integrity and unwearied zeal for the conscientious discharge of his duties have proved a sufficient refutation.  The opinion of this gentleman with respect to the expediency of adopting a liberal system, that may prove an effectual stimulus to reformation and good conduct in those who have unhappily deviated from the path of rectitude, has been expressed unequivocally both in his dispatches, and in the prominent measures of his government, and will deservedly carry with it more weight than the whole collected opposition which I anticipate from those who have been his opponents and calumniators.  The covert aim of these men is to convert the ignominy of the great body of the people into an hereditary deformity.  They would hand it down from father to son, and raise an eternal barrier of separation between their offspring, and the offspring of the unfortunate convict.  They would establish distinctions which may serve hereafter to divide the colonists into castes; and although none among them dares publicly avow that future generations should be punished for the crimes of their progenitors, yet such are their private sentiments; and they would have the present race branded with disqualifications, not more for the sake of pampering their own vanity, than with a view to reflect disgrace on the offspring of the disfranchised parent, and thus cast on their own children and descendants that future splendor and importance, which they consider to be their present peculiar and distinguishing characteristics.  Short-sighted fools! they foresee not the consequences of their narrow machinations!  They know not that they would be sowing the seeds of future discords and commotions, and that by exalting their immediate descendants, they would occasion the eventual degradation and overthrow of their posterity.  Such would be the result of their ambition; for it is the curse of injustice that it brings with it sooner or later its own punishment.  Happily for the colony the realization of their projects depends not upon themselves; and his Majesty’s ministers will not lend their sanction to schemes of private aggrandizement, which can only be accomplished