may, at first glance, be imagined. This person might also be
beneficially employed in comparing the stores shipped with the
receipts of the masters, so as to preclude all possibility of
practices which are inconsistent with the welfare of the
government, but which are too common, and can only be prevented
by the adoption of such a measure as the one which I now propose.
Whenever the governor of the colony should send over a
requisition, this agent ought immediately to be furnished with an
extract from his excellency's correspondence, so that by these
means the requisition would not be liable to neglect, and much
trouble would be spared to the Public Office, whose province it
had previously been to attend to this department. The reduction
of expense which would result from this appointment would be much
more than adequate to the increased expense incurred by the
appointment and remuneration of a gentleman of probity and
respectability to this office.

The method of conveying convicts from England is so very
inhuman, that some better and more benevolent measure ought to be
adopted. The lives of these unfortunate victims of depravity
ought surely to be regarded with as much care as those of any
other class of his Majesty's subjects; the contrary of this has,
however, been too frequently the case, and some of the masters of
the transports who have been entrusted with these captives, have
treated them with such uniform rigour that numbers have perished
through the intensity of their sufferings. This want of care is
to be attributed to the former custom of contracting for the
transport of the convicts at so much per head, so that the master
has no interest in the preservation of those entrusted to his
care. This evil, too, might also be remedied by the contract