and the maintenance of a self-assumed aristocratic importance?  And who would build their own and their families’ prosperity on the ruins of the social edifice, on the misery and degradation of thousands?  But it is useless to enlarge on this topic:  ministers will not allow their judgments to be warped by the subtle representations of this faction.  In organizing that new constitution for this colony, of which every motive of humanity and policy conspires to demonstrate the necessity, they will be actuated solely by those principles that are best calculated to further the philanthropic and enlightened ends which were contemplated by the legislature at the period of its foundation.  The good of the many will not be sacrificed to the sordid views of the few, and no disqualifications will be permitted, but such as are confessedly necessary for the repression of vice, and the promotion of morality and religion.

But, while I am thus contending against the total exclusion of such as may have been convicts from the enjoyment of this great privilege, I would by no means imply that the doors of the legislative assembly should be thrown open to all indiscriminately who may happen to be free.  An unrestricted ability to exercise a function of such great confidence and dignity, would superinduce consequences equally fatal with those against which I would guard:  in endeavouring to shun one extreme, it behoves us equally to avoid falling into the other.  The very principle which forbids their utter inadmissibility to become legislators, demands that none should be able to arrive at that dignity, but those whose conduct during their abode in the colony shall have been absolutely unimpeachable.  Retrospection should not be pushed beyond the period of their arrival; but their subsequent behaviour should be subjected to the severest tests, to the most rigorous scrutiny. Conviction either before a court or a magistrate, for any offence of a criminal nature, should be a bar to their pretensions for ever.  Crimes committed in this country should be overlooked when followed by adequate atonement and indubitable reformation; but the interests as well of the rising generation, as of the great body of the convicts themselves, require that the re-convicted felon, whom neither the hope of distinction can reclaim, nor the fear of punishment deter from a recurrence to his old iniquities, should be branded with the lasting impressions of infamy, and rendered for ever afterwards incapable of exercising so respectable and important a function as the one in question.