funds scarcely adequate to a permanent settlement in the colony; it will still further discourage the existing agriculturist and grazier, by lessening the demand of the government for their produce; and it will increase the general embarrassment, both by narrowing this channel of employment, which was supplied by the liberality of the government, and by curtailing the means of the colonists at large to provide labour for that part of the population, which will be thus turned loose on them twelvemonths sooner than usual.

To the credit of the present governor it must be allowed that he has done all that a benevolent heart and a sagacious head could dictate, to counteract the growing distress and misery.  He has exhausted all the means in his power to give employment to the large portion of unoccupied labour, which it has not been within the compass of individual enterprize to absorb.  He has effected the greatest improvements in the capital, by enlarging and straightening the streets, and by erecting various public edifices of the highest utility and ornament.  The same superintending hand is visible throughout all the inferior towns and townships, many of which indeed are of his own foundation.  He has made highways to every cultivated district, thus affording the inhabitants of them the greatest facilities for the cheap and expeditious conveyance of their produce to market.  In fine, throughout every part of the colony and its dependent settlements at the Derwent and Port Dalrymple, he has effected improvements which will long continue monuments of the wisdom and liberality of their author.  But it cannot be denied, however beneficial these and other improvements of the same nature which are in progress may be, either with respect to their immediate or more remote consequences, that they are but mere temporary sources of alleviation, whose benignant supply will cease with the discharge of the great body of workmen whom they at present maintain in activity.  This, indeed, as well as all the other expedients which I have already enumerated, as having been practised in order to find outlets for the superabundant labour, have been productive of no permanent result.

This assertion is satisfactorily substantiated by the present unnatural efforts of the colonists in the establishment of various manufactories, particularly those of cloth and hats.  I say unnatural, because in the common course of things, the origin of such establishments ought to be coeval only with an entire occupation of the soil, and redundancy of population.  And this chiefly for two reasons:  because a greater capital is required in their foundation, and a greater degree of skill and dexterity in their developement.  It is on this account that in Canada, and our colonies in the West Indies, which are in a great measure left to the guidance of their native legislatures, and which it is therefore to be presumed, adopt that line of policy at once most consistent with their own interests,