indifferent to their future fate, and careless of their conduct,
is a fact well known to all persons who have resided in the
settlement; and it therefore becomes a naturally interesting
question, by what means these convicts may be brought to
discharge their duties with more readiness, and to follow a
course of life more fraught with happiness to themselves, and
more satisfactory to those who are placed near them. The best
method which suggests itself to me, is that of employing
prisoners for life on government labour for a limited time only,
at the expiration of which period they should be made free of the
country, and, in case their conduct had been such as to merit
approbation, should be allowed to become settlers, with the usual
indulgences, and thus have the means once again placed before
them of raising themselves to a respectable rank in society, in
that country to which they had been banished. Those, on the other
hand, who are found to be dissolute and abandoned characters when
their term of labour had expired, might be made free also; but,
instead of being allowed to become settlers and to receive
indulgences, they might be taken off the stores, and be compelled
to labour for their daily bread. Such an amelioration of the
punishment of those unhappy delinquents who have incurred this
heavy vengeance of the laws of their country, would induce
numbers to look forward into futurity with a satisfaction which
they had not possessed previously, arising out of the distant
hope of becoming opulent and respectable, and of making the
renewal, in the decline of their existence, of those prospects
which, in their earlier years, had been eluded and destroyed by
their vices; and this idea would not fail to stimulate them to a
conduct more laudable, and calculated to accelerate the
accomplishment of their wishes. It may be brought against this