by the sacrifice of the public good.  If these men have not themselves the sagacity to dive into futurity, and to foresee the dangers and contests to which unjust privileges and distinctions must eventually give birth, shall the government be equally blind and improvident?  Shall they in the short space of thirty years forget the benevolent designs for which this colony was founded, and convert what was intended as an asylum for repentant vice, not into a house merely of salutary correction, which may moderate with reviving morality and cease entirely with complete reformation, but into a prison of endless torture, where though the sufferings of the body may terminate, the worst species of torture, the endurements and mortifications of the soul, are to end only with existence?  Shall a vile faction be allowed to inflict on the unfortunate convict a punishment infinitely greater than that to which he has been sentenced by the violated majesty of the law?  Has not a jury of impartial freemen solemnly investigated the case of every individual who has been transported to this colony?  And have not the measure and duration of their punishments been apportioned to their respective offences?  Is it then for any body of men to assert that the law has been too lenient, and that it is necessary to inflict an ulterior punishment which shall have no termination but in the grave?  Shall the unhappy culprit, exiled from his native shore, and severed perhaps for ever from the friends of his youth, the objects of his first and best affections, after years of suffering and atonement, still find no resting place,—­no spot where he may hide his shame and endeavour to forget his errors?  Shall the finger of scorn and derision be pointed at him wherever he betake himself?  And must he for ever wander a recreant and outcast on the face of the earth, seeking in vain some friendly shore, where he may at length be freed from ignominious disabilities, and restored to the long lost enjoyment of equal rights and equal protection with his fellows?

I am aware it may be here urged that these men, if they were to return to this country, could never enjoy the privileges for which I am contending; and that the very same laws, which have fixed the bounds of their corporal punishment have deprived them for ever of the most valuable rights of citizens.  To this I reply, that in this country, whither if the whole of the convicts who have been exiled from its shores were to return, they would form but an inconsiderable portion of the people, all such disqualifications as the law has annexed to conviction in a court of justice, are good policy; because they tend to promote virtue and discountenance vice.  But the very same grounds of policy require that such disqualifications should not exist in New South Wales.  There the great mass of the people are composed of persons who have been under the operation of the law, and who were transported with the avowed intention of the legislature